Nope. The MacOS Dock is a direct-line descendent of the NeXTstep Dock, which dates from 1988 and predates CDE by five years.

Yes it is from NeXT, but the the article describes a dock at the bottom of the screen that is centered. NeXT Dock by default was on the left side and vertical, so NeXT is irrelevant per the article. See:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:NeXTSTEP_desktop.png

So the first dock I new of as described by the article was CDE. As someone mentioned RisCOS may have preceded it.

I have a NeXTstation on my desk, thanks.

The MacOS X dock, since day one, has been able to be pinned vertically on either side or centered horizontally on the bottom, as a user option. It functions identically regardless. The dock was derived straight from the Rhapsody dock, which was just a port of the NeXTSTEP dock.

The RiscOS shelf thing was a simpler device, but it was a year earlier, agreed. But your claim was that MacOS X's dock is derived from CDE, or I guess now RiscOS, and these claims are very highly dubious. Indeed with a good probability NeXT's engineers had not even seen RiscOS. The NeXTSTEP dock, complete with a black hole (later recycling sign) for trash can, was meant to be reminiscent to how people often laid out icons on the Mac Finder Desktop.

Yes, MAC OS dock came from NeXT, but by default NeXT did not center it on the bottom, the article said middle-aligned.

The only one I remembered doing that did that by default is CDE, not NeXT. Someone else brought up RiscOS.

By your logic, I could say Xerox Alto was the first if a launcher could be added and centered at the bottom manually :)

The RISC OS, specifically the "Arthur" version released in 1987, was the first to have something like the Dock. Look at the screenshot on the Wikipedia page.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_RISC_OS