You can call it whatever you want but it's an inviolable horizontal container on the bottom of the screen reserved for iconified applications and storage controls upon which applications can not occlude.
Windows 1.0 doesn't really have a desktop metaphor in the modern sense as in some rectangle with free floating icons which represent arbitrary files or folders. Windows 2.0 made the icon space the entire background which can be occluded by applications and 3.0 introduced the merging of the metaphors into a "desktop" that we're all familiar with. Stating they're all equivalent I think is a bit of stretch.
> You can call it whatever you want but it's an inviolable horizontal container on the bottom of the screen reserved for iconified applications and storage controls upon which applications can not occlude.
But it wasn't a concept that Microsoft was particularly wedded to. It disappeared in Windows 3.x.
Windows itself wasn't a concept microsoft was wedded to until windows 3.0 ... after 1.0 it was mostly axed. It took a giant internal effort to get windows 2.0 resourced for development and release and then there was a bunch of politics that started with TopView (which had many clones such as quarterdeck desqview) and ended with OS/2 1.3 that got 3.0 out the door. MS was probably fully committed to OS/2 up until about 1989/90"
IBM was still pushing its MCA based PS/2 machines at the time and the writing was on the wall when the gang of nine did EISA as a response instead of forking over a license fee.
I don't know what this has to do with anything. Claiming that RISC OS invented the dock or was the first to do it is bunk. I'm a huge fan of innovation and like RISC OS but I'm a bigger fan of accurate history.
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* accounts differ on this. Some, like Ferguson in the Computer Wars depict as a bad faith sabotage, while others such as in hard drive, brush that off as a conspiracy theory while others such as in barbarians led by Bill Gates say there were fundamental opinion conflicts by important primadonna programmers. I think it's likely all the above, there's enough people involved and the theories don't necessarily conflict
