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by ianetaylor 2002 days ago
RiscOS definitely had significant influence on early Windows releases but the Taskbar ala Windows 95 was primarily a derivative of Windows 1.0 (minimized apps at the bottom of the screen) and Cairo (a reserved screen area) and Taskman (list of running apps)
1 comments
Torwald 2002 days ago
The Win95 UI was a copy from NextStep, down to the teal desktop, every nerd understood that one at the time. Sure, some elements from prior Windows version survived, like the DOS icon.

> Windows 1.0 (minimized apps at the bottom of the screen)

This could very well be the case. The Win95 Taskbar could be positioned at the other three sides of the screen, IIRC. At least it could be positioned at the top.

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ianetaylor 2002 days ago
Mac was more of an influence on Win95 than NeXT for obvious reasons. We had a couple of NeXT machines but didn't use them much. We had a couple of Archimedes machines and at least one team member was addicted to Lemmings :)

Yes, the Taskbar could be docked on any screen edge. FWIW, I wrote some of that docking code. I preferred the left edge (ala NeXT), the designers preferred the top (ala Mac) but it broke too many apps so it ended up back at the bottom.

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