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Comment by smorchyborch | Hacker News Reader

Kinda funny watching people OOoh and Aaaah over something that Windows had launched 5 years earlier with Win95. The Mac/Windows flamewars back then were still as vivid as they are today.

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If you're talking about the Dock demo (vs the Windows taskbar), it's not so much the Dock itself getting that reaction but more so the Genie effect. Mac OS X 10.0 and its Quartz Compositor did enable window effects beyond what Windows was capable of at the time--Windows didn't get a compositing window manager until Vista was released in 2007.

I don't recall Windows 95 spatially minimizing windows into the bottom of the screen while preserving their dynamically updating contents. Did it? Or was it full of identical grey rectangles and moved window contents just by their outline, not their contents? The Aqua interface was a cut above given the landscape even five years later.

> Or was it full of identical grey rectangles and moved window contents just by their outline, not their contents?

It moved the whole window, but you could enable the effect you mention to save on system resources. (If memory serves right.)

I believe full-window moves were an optional Windows 98 feature. Possibly also available in Windows 95 via registry tweaks or if you had Microsoft Plus! installed.

My memory might be from Windows 98, yes.

I remember full-window moves from Windows 95 and even the Windows 95 preview skin for Windows NT 3.51.

Windows 95 > System Properties > Performance > "Show window contents while dragging"

It's kind of easy to forget OSX did this but it was glacially slow at first.

I remember seeing the Betas in 1999-2000 or so and they were on an iMac and the whole UI barely worked.

And I think in 2004-2006 I was still turning the animations down or selecting the simpler ones. I maybe started leaving them on when I got a monster Mac Pro in 2006.

The Dock was an evolution of the applets that had originated in NeXTSTEP several years before Windows 95’s UI team iterated the “system tray” into the taskbar that actually shipped.

And I guess Windows 95 was sorta building on the fact you could stack your open windows at the bottom of the screen in Windows 3.x. The early versions of 95 I was running still had the 3.x look to the taskbar/dock:

http://toastytech.com/guis/chic58.html

As the author notes, Windows 95 was remarkable for the iterative process that Microsoft’s UI folks undertook. They published an article in the ACM [1] on how they completely discarded the previous approach of designing from first principles in a vacuum in favor of rapid iteration and frequent usability testing. This let them abandon their fear of changing too much—in fact, the article directly addresses the evolution of taskbar icons from the version shown in your linked screenshots to what eventually shipped.

[1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/238386.238611

That's not too dissimilar to the folder tabs which appeared at some point in classic MacOS, though I don't remember when: quite possibly after '95.

IIRC that was with MacOS 8, which was in 1997.

The dock has more to do with NeXTSTEP’s than with the Windows taskbar. They really are quite different (though maybe less so these days compared to back in the late 1990).

Kinda funny watching Windows nerds ooh and aah over something Jobs launched 7 years earlier with NEXTSTEP :)

And whatever was in Win95 was in Motif, right? Come on it was distinctively superior when it came out.

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