4 ms·

Nextstep 1.0, 1989, with a dock.

• masswerk 4y ago
  However, RISC OS (Acorn), 1987, with an icon bar. :-) Project lead Paul Fellows is quoted in this article [1] as follows ("Arthur" being the code name for one of two competing projects, which became RISC OS), > "I found this page I was very pleased by: 'Apple acquired the Dock from Steve Jobs' NeXTstep OS which stole it from Acorn's Arthur Operating System of 1987.'" and, > "There was a guy at Colton Software with us… who joined Microsoft in Seattle, and it was shortly after that that Windows acquired an icon bar. I know how that idea got there." And on the rationale behind it, > "In case anyone ever asked where it came from, we were sat in a room thinking 'how do we design this to be different, so we don't get sued by Apple?' The Mac had a menu bar of text across the top, so we thought 'we can't go across the top, we'll have to go across the bottom – and we can't use text, so we'll have to use icons.' That's why it's like that," [1] https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/23/how_risc_os_happened/ https://www.theregister.com/2022/06/23/how_risc_os_happened/ Edit: That said, Xerox PARC had the Cedar development environment in the 1980s and this featured sort of a task/icon bar already. Notably, the second, long ongoing project for an Acorn operating system, written in Modula 2, was conducted at ARC (Acorn Research Center) in Palo Alto, next to PARC. There may have been some exchange (and inspiration) involved. [2] http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/parc/techReports/CSL-83-11_The_Cedar_Programming_Environment_A_Midterm_Report_and_Examination.pdf http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/parc/techReports/CSL-83-1... [3] Video, "Eric Bier Demonstrates Cedar", CHM YT channel, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_dt7NG38V4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_dt7NG38V4