ianetaylor

It was dropped in 3.0 but earlier Windows versions had a sort-of icon bar for apps. https://www.makeuseof.com/history-windows-taskbar/

I had issues travelling a few years ago, nothing serious just lots of back-to-back secondary screening. I contacted DHS and was notified weeks later my case had been reviewed. They never explained what happened but the screenings stopped.

Like so many I learned to code on a ZX80 and basically never stopped. I'm here 40+ years later, typing this on a HoloLens and marveling at the impact that little computer had on me and the world. RIP Sir Clive

I wrote the '95 Start Menu among other bits and pieces. Mostly the team was just a bunch of regular devs but with a few crazy-smart types making the rest of us look good. RaymondC to name but one.

Several of that original team are still at Microsoft, I currently work on HoloLens

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.

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)

Is this like Microsoft Office 'click to run'?

While RISC OS was influential, the 'app bar' idea mostly came from Windows 1.0 with minimized apps at the bottom of the screen. It went through several iterations and for a while it was a storage location for documents with no apps at all. Eventually the simple app list tested best so that's what stuck.

[I worked on parts of the Win95 UI although George Pitt I think did most of the work on the Taskbar itself]

Fwiw, UWP supports writing apps for the Windows Store using JS & HTML I'm going to try porting one of my Chrome Apps over to see how easy/hard it is.

Start Menu engineer here. There was a bunch of precedent for having a bar at the bottom of the screen (Dos apps, Windows 1.0, Cairo etc) but mostly it was a compat issue; a bunch apps broke if the Taskbar was at the top. We thought that we could maybe move it to the top when these apps got fixed but of course by then everyone was used to it at the bottom even if the 'drop up' menu wasn't great UX.

To be fair to google they are supporting asm.js, just with a different implementation design. Native Client is orthogonal.

+1 for using Google Voice. They catch most spam and call screening gets the rest. Only close friends have my actual cell number.

Exactly. SpaceX said this would be 50/50 at best so not a failure in that sense. They'll go again in a month with more hydraulic fluid and learn more. No doubt it'll take a whole series of tests to get this working reliably. Still impressive imho.

Fwiw, Chicago (what became Windows 95) was originally planned to ship in 93. Yes, we were pretty bad at scheduling back then :)

At the time Microsoft's Languages Division was run by a Welsh guy (David Jones) and he liked to hire fellow Brits.

*so people wouldn't accidentally click it

I don't remember where the [X] came from specifically but there were a bunch of Brits on the Windows team at the time (myself included) and we had a number of Archimedes machines around. A lot of Lemmings was played.

I remember there was nearly endless debate about where the [X] should go so people wouldn't accidentally. I think the desire to make it visually distinct was a big factor.

We were going to show a couple of cool Native Client demos during the keynote but we had to cut them at the last minute due to time constraints.