Which came first, Windows 95's taskbar or NeXT's Dock? Neither

Last week marked the 31st anniversary of Windows 95 going on sale. More than three decades later, suggestions about the influences behind its interface can still rile some of the people who built it. The Reg FOSS desk prompted spirited responses from several former Microsoft employees after noting possible British influences on NeXTstep and Windows 95. The exchange began with a passing comment in an X thread started by former Microsoft engineer Dave Plummer, who has spoken regularly to The Register since at least 2020. Former Microsoft executive Joe Belfiore responded: The NeXT dock did NOT lead to the taskbar. Two things did: 1) Cairo team had been designing an always visible, bottom-of-the-screen "tray" .. which was a drop target for files, text-content, etc… to facilitate easy transfer of stuff from one place/app to another…. — Joe Belfiore (@joebelfiore) August 25, 2026 Belfiore's post has already inspired at least one article examining the taskbar's origins. The claim attracting the rebuttals comes from Paul Fellows, who led Acorn's original Arthur project. Its codename reflected the team's optimistic schedule: A Risc by THURsday. In 2022, this vulture moderated a discussion between four members of the original Acornsoft team. Organized by ROUGOL, the RISC OS User Group of London, the event marked the operating system's 35th anniversary. It was also covered by Acorn news site Icon Bar, named after the most distinctive element of Acorn's desktop. The Register subsequently published highlights from the discussion, including Fellows' views on Arthur's influence on NeXTstep and Windows. Fellows told us: "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.' "Damn right it did! Tragically, you couldn't patent software at that point. So this was the one I invented: I came up with the idea of the icon bar across the bottom. 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." King Arthur Arthur was the original ARM OS for the first models of Acorn's new RISC-based Archimedes computers, which shipped in 1987. The Reg celebrated the Archimedes' 25th anniversary back in 2012, and that article includes a screenshot of the Arthur OS. You can see some more in the GUIdebook gallery of Arthur 1.2. Arthur's desktop was only intended to be a BASIC demo, but Acorn shipped it along with the rest of Arthur. For version 2 in 1989, Acorn gave it a slightly more technical-sounding name: RISC OS – although the design of Arthur's desktop, complete with icon bar, persisted. Fellows originally made those remarks during his first appearance at ROUGOL in 2012, for which a full transcript is available. He delivered a similar talk at the RISC OS London show in 2015, and that version is on YouTube. From a simple chronology, it looks like Acorn's Arthur had the first "icon bar" in 1987. Allegedly, a former Acorn engineer moved to California, taking his Archimedes with him, and showed it to his colleagues. The following year saw Steve Jobs unveil the NeXT Cube. ToastyTech has a screenshot gallery of NeXTstep 0.8, and you can even play with it in Infinite Mac. For historical context, Windows 2.0 was released in December 1987 with flat, outlined window controls, as GUIdebook shows. OS/2 1.1, the first version of OS/2 with its Presentation Manager GUI, followed in late 1988. Its appearance was closely related to that of Windows 2, unsurprisingly given that Microsoft and IBM had jointly developed OS/2. This OS/2 1.1 gallery shows the resemblance. NeXT demonstrated its new grayscale GUI in 1988, with pseudo-3D shading used throughout. In October 1989, IBM released OS/2 1.2, and WinWorld's images show that it had gained similar shading on window controls and dialog-box buttons. The 3D look became still more prominent in Windows 3.0, released in May 1990. The chronology and visual similarities make NeXTstep a plausible influence on the later OS/2 and Windows interfaces, although screenshots alone cannot establish that its designers copied or even consulted it. Readers can compare the images and draw their own conclusions. The Microsoft Cairo project to which Belfiore refers ran from 1991 to 1996. Development ended in the year Microsoft released Windows NT 4, whose anniversary we marked last week with a mention of Cairo. Further down Belfiore's thread, former Windows chief Steven Sinofsky posted: "The Cairo team had some NeXT machines like we did on the AFX team :)" To be clear, we are not claiming that the Windows 95 taskbar copied NeXT's dock. The two served different purposes: the original taskbar was primarily an application switcher, while the Start menu acted as the launcher. The taskbar also performed several other functions. Even so, the prior art is part of the historical record. A persistent strip along the bottom of the desktop first appeared in Acorn's Arthur, the predecessor to RISC OS, in 1987. NeXTstep had a comparable dock by 1988. By the time the Windows taskbar appeared in 1995, NeXTstep 3.3 was available for non-NeXT hardware and was well established – helped in part by the CIA buying plenty of NeXT machines, as the Wall Street Journal reported last month. ®