I had issues travelling a few years ago, nothing serious just lots of back-to-back secondary screening. I contacted DHS and was notified weeks later my case had been reviewed. They never explained what happened but the screenings stopped.
Like so many I learned to code on a ZX80 and basically never stopped. I'm here 40+ years later, typing this on a HoloLens and marveling at the impact that little computer had on me and the world.
RIP Sir Clive
I wrote the '95 Start Menu among other bits and pieces.
Mostly the team was just a bunch of regular devs but with a few crazy-smart types making the rest of us look good. RaymondC to name but one.
Several of that original team are still at Microsoft, I currently work on HoloLens
Mac was more of an influence on Win95 than NeXT for obvious reasons. We had a couple of NeXT machines but didn't use them much. We had a couple of Archimedes machines and at least one team member was addicted to Lemmings :)
Yes, the Taskbar could be docked on any screen edge. FWIW, I wrote some of that docking code. I preferred the left edge (ala NeXT), the designers preferred the top (ala Mac) but it broke too many apps so it ended up back at the bottom.
RiscOS definitely had significant influence on early Windows releases but the Taskbar ala Windows 95 was primarily a derivative of Windows 1.0 (minimized apps at the bottom of the screen) and Cairo (a reserved screen area) and Taskman (list of running apps)
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]