[asveikau]

But I thought the Chicago UI was also present in some form in cairo, and that is where some of it originated. Is that true?

I know the history of NT based windows much better, I was at MS later, and in Windows.

[fcbrooklyn]

There may have been some overlap, but as I remember it the main thrust of Cairo wasn't really about UI. It was an object based filesystem, and some other fancy shit going on under the covers. (I was on Apps, and we never targetted Cairo, never got a chance to play with it directly, but I saw it demoed a few times, and I remember the UI looking more like NT/3.11. Could easily be misremembering that part though)

EDIT: Yeah, you're right, there was some UI that made it to 95. From wikipedia:

"The Windows 95 user interface was based on the initial design work that was done on the Cairo user interface."