System 7 was WAY earlier than Windows 95, it was 1991, a little more than 4 years earler (like an eternity):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_7
"It was introduced on May 13, 1991 ..."
And even 7.1 was almost exactly 3 years earlier: System 7.1
"In August 1992, the 7.1 update was released."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_95
"It was released on August 24, 1995"
Not even Windows 3.1 had been released at the time System 7 came out, it's competitor on MS side was DOS (version 5.00):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_DOS_operating_syst...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_3.1x
or some of the various semi-graphical third party shells for DOS.
Sure it did, namely Windows 1.0, 2.10/2.11 (actually Windows/286 and Windows/386), but very few people used them.
Windows 3.0 was the first one to have some diffusion, but it had very limited capabilities, and it's adoption was slow because of the increased specifications for the PC, and in any case not comparable with the later wide adoption of 3.1.
Yup! For the longest time I liked to work with a half-width browser window to match my half-width editor & word processor windows. It drove me crazy the number of websites which set their body text to some fraction of the window width, which looked good with a fullscreen window but terrible with a halfscreen one.
Eventually I just gave up. The whole point of the web was device-independent information transfer, but somehow we allowed device-dependence to sneak it.
You can play around with it on archive.org. https://archive.org/details/mac_MacOS_7.0.1_compilation
There was no task bar or dock or anything else really to minimise to. IIRC there were addons for 7.1 that added "window shading": a button on the window title bar that reduces the window to just the title bar.[1]
The closest thing to a maximise button in classic Mac OS was more like a size-to-fit button: the application gave the window manager a hint which was the appropriate size for the document displayed, be it a file folder, a word processor document or whatever. Having a single window fill the entire screen wasn't as common as it was on Windows.
None of this was particularly strange to me back then.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WindowShade apparently a standard feature later on