There was persistent noise even back in the 90s that the icon bar was inspiration for the Windows task bar in Win95. Quite the basis for it, or if it was nonsense, no idea. (HN has previously surfaced some serious Acorn related historical surprises, so someone here may actually know).

What has been quite surprising over the years is how violently many people raised with Open/Save dialogs hate the Risc OS filer and approach to saving and loading files.

Paul Fellows absolutely claims that. From https://astrospeakers.org/provider/paul-fellows :

> He worked on the first generation of home computers and lead the design of the RiscOS operating system for the ARM processor, including inventing the apps and icon bar user interface that has since spread to phones and computers across the world