[immibis]

Even some of the "proprietary nonsense" is better than HTML. Visual Basic let you just drag-and-drop controls onto a page, arranged in any way you liked! Now, it wasn't responsive, but we didn't have smartphones back then so nobody cared.

[mixmastamyk]

There were layout managers in the 90s which were responsive, though they wouldn’t reflow widgets vertically. Similar to horizontal flexbox.

I bet someone could have added the functionality but it just didn’t matter when all screens were squareish.