A recent X thread reignited a long-running debate about the origins of Windows 95's taskbar, after former Microsoft executive Joe Belfiore insisted it was not derived from NeXT's Dock but grew out of internal Microsoft work by the Cairo team. The Register notes this echoes a claim it previously reported from Paul Fellows, who led Acorn's Arthur operating system project, that the icon bar he designed in 1987 was the true ancestor of both NeXTstep's Dock and, by extension, Windows' taskbar, sparking pushback from former Microsoft staff.

Fellows says he devised Arthur's bottom-of-screen icon bar deliberately to differ from the Mac's top menu bar and avoid legal trouble with Apple, and has repeated the claim in talks dating back to 2012. Acorn's Archimedes computers, running Arthur, shipped in 1987, a year before Steve Jobs unveiled the NeXT Cube, with an anecdote suggesting a former Acorn engineer showed the machine to Californian colleagues. The article also notes Windows 2.0 appeared in December 1987 with different, flat window controls, and that IBM's OS/2 1.1 followed in 1988, complicating any straightforward chronology of who influenced whom.