> Ruby was originally going to be a customizable shell/desktop for Windows 3.0, with pretty much what Bill was demoing but a more modest scripting language - and the ability to plug in other scripting languages as desired.

Was it meant to compete with Norton Desktop? Norton Desktop had an extremely powerful built-in visual scripting language that resembled Visual Basic, so powerful it's strange that it wasn't a separate product. I learned about this from https://youtube.com/watch?v=iD7AezjG5YE&t=25m52s.