Wow - does this bring back some memories.

I remember when CTL3D.dll was all the rage.

Good times.

To think we used to worry about VB programs needing a separate runtime to distribute them and Delphi programs, while stand-alone, took up almost 200KB for a minimal app!

Ah, THREED.VBX, good times indeed.

Hahah, yes! I was obsessed with THREED.VBX, but because I was learning C at the time ended up writing a whole library of Windows custom-drawn controls that looked exactly the same. I guess it was only later that I learned there was nothing special about VBX libraries and that you could (with some boilerplate) make them work from C.

Kids nowadays have it so easy with their Electrons and QTs...

I think it improved on NextStep by adding things like the underlines for keyboard accessibility, but the basic style (i.e. buttons that look like buttons) is very similar.

a) The NextStep UI you post seems nothing special compared to other Unix-es of the time (SGI IRIX, https://www.securitronlinux.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/1..., and Sun Solaris and IBM AIX come to mind). I believe that these precede the NextStep.

b) The Windows 95 UI looks nothing like NextStep (or SGI IRIX and the other X Windows UIs of the time) to my eyes. In particular, they made a distinct move away from the drab grey look of all Unix UIs, which was a really welcome splash of color. I still find that grey look reminding me of my days in the Unix lab at college, and I find it hard to relate to the enthusiasm of Apple fans for the boring grey look of macOs, which is clearly a '70s Unix look!

That.. doesn’t actually functionally change a whole lot? Though I can see how it would be super cool at the time.

most apps didnt, but the consistency was much better with 95. The major user-facing changes was the taskbar and right clicks. It felt really consistent and made sense as a whole remarkably better than previous versions.

Taskbar was a bad clone of RISC OS's iconbar, but without the separation of Application and Window/Document that made it so much better

While RISC OS was influential, the 'app bar' idea mostly came from Windows 1.0 with minimized apps at the bottom of the screen. It went through several iterations and for a while it was a storage location for documents with no apps at all. Eventually the simple app list tested best so that's what stuck.

[I worked on parts of the Win95 UI although George Pitt I think did most of the work on the Taskbar itself]