(This was also the OS with the first icon-based taskbar, before NeXTstep and its Dock; and also the first GUI where dragging a window to move it moved the window contents, not just a dotted outline. It's the original inspiration for the Windows 95 taskbar.)
I deployed and supported Windows 2.01 in production. IMHO, it's not really anything like a taskbar, though. It looks a bit like it if you only know Win2 from screenshots, but if you used it, it's not.
It's just an area of the desktop. Windows minimize to icons on the desktop. (The only icons on the desktop.) They zoom down into icons at the bottom of the screen, that's all. If you manage to keep Win2 running long enough to fill the bottom row, it starts a 2nd row above it. You can, if I recall, also pick them up and move them if you so wish.
In a tiny echo of the tiling windows in Windows 1.x, normal-sized windows avoid covering up that bottom area, but if you minimise all windows you can see: it's not a strip or bar or anything. It's not contained in any way. It's not a special region and nothing else goes there simply because Win2.x doesn't put anything else on the desktop itself.
NeXTSTEP was first shown in 1988, before RISC OS 2. I never used Arthur but it was a lot more primitive IIRC. Even the icon bar in RISC OS is less sophisticated than NeXT’s Dock.
It was, but the NeXTstep beta 0.8 was after Arthur 1.20, and the icon bar concept was in Arthur. RO's version is less sophisticated, yes, I agree. Highly functional, though.
I moderated a talk and discussion by the surviving members of the original RISC OS core team a couple of years ago. I wrote it up here:
The claim is from the team lead, Paul Fellows. To paraphrase him: One of the programmers got a job with NeXT, quit, went to California, and took his Archimedes. Lo, the next beta of NeXTstep had an icon bar!
I’ll give it a watch. I had the unusual experience of using RISC OS and NeXTSTEP at roughly the same time from 1991-1996. Until 1996 the only machine I really had that was my own was an Amstrad CPC 464 which had various add-ons and eventually an extra 3.5 inch disk drive attached which made transferring files much easier. For a while I had a cheap MS-DOS luggable and used a serial cable to transfer small text files from the CPC to the Toshiba T1000, eventually getting a slow modem for the CPC.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC_OS
(This was also the OS with the first icon-based taskbar, before NeXTstep and its Dock; and also the first GUI where dragging a window to move it moved the window contents, not just a dotted outline. It's the original inspiration for the Windows 95 taskbar.)
There are a couple of pics of v2 here:
https://www.houseofmabel.com/personal/computers/riscos/
And a gallery of RISC OS 3:
http://toastytech.com/guis/riscos.html