I'm not the OP, but I was around for this stuff at the time (my first exposure to ~Unix was Andrew at CMU in like '88) and while I definitely look back at some

I'm not the OP, but I was around for this stuff at the time (my first exposure to ~Unix was Andrew at CMU in like '88) and while I definitely look back at some of it nostalgically, most of my nostalgia is for the contemporaneous Mac OS. Open Look and the various X11 systems were pretty primitive, in comparison. And slow, for the most part, at least with the class of workstation I got to use. A lot of the idiom of what we see today was actually developed by Microsoft, for Windows 95. That's fine, but it's also pretty monocultural. The classic Mac OS had a different set of assumptions than Windows did, but the industry has chased that Cairo dream.