Everybody assumed the Home windows taskbar copied a rival OS. Microsoft says no

However the basis for the Home windows taskbar was laid in “Cairo,” a Microsoft mission launched again in 1991. In Cairo, “fields” had been positioned on the backside of the display and had been at all times seen. In creating the Home windows 95 taskbar, the Cairo design was mixed with a characteristic from Home windows 3.1 that was used to reduce home windows.

An identical idea to the Home windows taskbar appeared even earlier in 1988, within the NeXTSTEP working system for Steve Jobs’s NeXT computer systems, so many assumed the inspiration got here from there. Nevertheless, in line with Microsoft veterans, this wasn’t the case. (The NeXTSTEP answer truly went on to turn out to be the direct precursor to macOS’s Dock.)

Over time, the taskbar in Home windows has developed fairly a bit. Nevertheless, probably the most criticized change occurred in 2021 with the arrival of Home windows 11, which fastened the taskbar to the middle of the underside edge and eliminated the flexibility to reposition it. Customers hated the shortage of customization a lot that Microsoft lately introduced that taskbar characteristic again.