> Many of the UI paradigms are still used today. True. > Windows 95 introduced the start menu and the task bar, True. > windows 3.11 didn't have them in tha

> Many of the UI paradigms are still used today. True. > Windows 95 introduced the start menu and the task bar, True. > windows 3.11 didn't have them in that form. It didn't have them in _any_ form. It had the Program Manager and the File Manager, inherited from OS/2 1.1. > The start menu was just an applications folder No, it wasn't. > (a bit like on Mac) Again no. Not at all. The Start menu is a hierarchical browser showing a tree constructed on-the-fly from the storage on disk. That storage is just a folder, yes, but it's a folder containing shortcuts and folders. It does not contain anything else: no binaries, no programs, no config. Just directories full of shortcuts. (For hardcore Unix folks: "shortcuts" are Windows >= 95's version of symlinks, with more and richer metadata, but they are filer-GUI-level only and are not understood by the shell, because the shell predates them by a decade or more.) > and the task bar was some shortcuts on what was basically the desktop. Nope, not at all. It's a rich UI in its own right with half a dozen separate interacting components: in Win95, it contained the start menu, then a window switcher, then a notification area containing sub-controls (as separate applets) and the clock. It is more complex and sophisticated than the only 2 limited bits of prior art: the icon bar in Acorn's RISC OS, and the Dock in NeXTstep, which was influenced by RISC OS. > I don't think windows 3 had a registry either. It did, but all it stored were file associations: the 3 letter extensions on the end of filenames, and what app opened what file extension. > It really became what we still know as windows today. True.