I assume most people are like this, and the start menu was a huge improvement. Most people would have been lost if it was just windows and icons freely floating in a 2d space.

True.

> Windows 95 introduced the start menu and the task bar,

True.

> windows 3.11 didn't have them in that form.

It didn't have them in _any_ form. It had the Program Manager and the File Manager, inherited from OS/2 1.1.

> The start menu was just an applications folder

No, it wasn't.

> (a bit like on Mac)

Again no. Not at all.

The Start menu is a hierarchical browser showing a tree constructed on-the-fly from the storage on disk. That storage is just a folder, yes, but it's a folder containing shortcuts and folders. It does not contain anything else: no binaries, no programs, no config. Just directories full of shortcuts.

(For hardcore Unix folks: "shortcuts" are Windows >= 95's version of symlinks, with more and richer metadata, but they are filer-GUI-level only and are not understood by the shell, because the shell predates them by a decade or more.)

> and the task bar was some shortcuts on what was basically the desktop.

Nope, not at all. It's a rich UI in its own right with half a dozen separate interacting components: in Win95, it contained the start menu, then a window switcher, then a notification area containing sub-controls (as separate applets) and the clock.

It is more complex and sophisticated than the only 2 limited bits of prior art: the icon bar in Acorn's RISC OS, and the Dock in NeXTstep, which was influenced by RISC OS.

> I don't think windows 3 had a registry either.

It did, but all it stored were file associations: the 3 letter extensions on the end of filenames, and what app opened what file extension.

> It really became what we still know as windows today.

True.