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NeXT is probably the pretty direct ancestor of osx dock. Only Apple turned it from good to bad by moving it to the bottom, where there is no space. And that only got worse as screens became wider, but not taller. And they made it overlap and obscure content and bounce around if you got near it making it extra obnoxious and hard to use.
Other docks existed even before, of course.
I once had a hard drive of some particular vintage that wasn’t able to start. I did actually get it running with a hammer tap. Got the remains of data out and replaced the drive. It was nothing special, a Unix system drive with nothing that wasn’t on tape, but I just had to see if I could fix a hard drive with a hammer.
I also remember one admin who would often be seen walking between computer maintenance room and workshop wing with drives and a blacksmiths hammer labelled “format”.