As far as I can tell, Windows 3.1 was designed around a pretty-coherent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooming_user_interface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoomi

As far as I can tell, Windows 3.1 was designed around a pretty-coherent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooming_user_interface https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooming_user_interface metaphor... as implemented on computers not powerful enough to actually do zooming UI. Think about it: windows "iconified" to the desktop, and the icons for many programs and document types were intended to look like (a stylized version of) what the program's main window would look like if shrunk down to that size. You had windows inside windows; and in programs like Program Manager, you could open up icons inside windows to get more windows inside your windows. All they needed to do is to make the windows that open up inside windows, open up embedded within the window that previously contained their icon (i.e. recursive MDI, rather than sibling MDI), and it'd have been true ZUI. Of course, that would have been an awful idea on hardware without the ability to render anti-aliased resampled images in real-time, nor any input device that could implement an analogue pinch-to-zoom gesture. But what I'm saying is, you could design an OS around "what Windows 3.1 was trying to do" today, and it'd be pretty cool.