The genius of sidekick was that you could access it instantly by holding down two keys on your keyboard: I liked to use the two shift keys.
This doesn't sound like much these days but you must remember that we are talking about the time of DOS, when you had to stop running one program if you wanted to run another one!
Sidekick's secret was that it was a "Terminate and Stay Resident" (TSR) program. So when you ran it, it appeared to finish and you were returned to the command prompt but it fact it was still running and could be brought up instantly using the 2-key combination.
I thought TSR programs were so cool. I got one of my team to write one which allowed us to send printouts to a printer in another building (and you could still use the PC attached to the printer for other things of course). I wrote one myself later when I worked in Lotus Development. It addressed a problem which Lotus Freelance had on some platforms.
I would include Sidekick in the list of the programs which influenced me most because it showed that PCs were not just "one thing at a time".
