Bullshit. In 1995 people were creating desktop UIs order of magnitude more complex than today's anemic webapps, without any of the braindamage-inducing stuff that's happening in web UI development.
Win 95 was a toy, NT was getting there. Apps were being ported quickly to NT4.
I do remember using Maya on Irix in '97 or so and it was already pretty amazing. It was built off earlier applications like power animimator, which was started in '88:
Excel is quite complex, but the Excel of 2022 is far more complex than the Excel of 1995, and part of it exists on the web itself, so Excel '22 would be an invalidation of your argument that '95 apps were more complex (as well as other modern versions of the other apps).
One major difference in 1995 applications is that almost none of them were collaborative or synced with a remote server. They were all isolated applications that worked entirely in a local context. They could be programmed to a single target platform on perhaps one to three screen resolutions (640x480, 800x600 and 1024x768). They could all work under the assumption that one style of input was being used (mouse and/or keyboard). They all could use simple built-in dropdown context menus. They could all render to a canvas context graphics with much of the heavy lifting assumed by the operating system itself.
We certainly had network programming in the 90s. It was just that apps didn't use it unless needed. SGI res was typically 1280x1024 and Wacom tablets were common in studio/professional settings.
Apps didn't use it because it wasn't practical or in high demand yet. People were just getting used to checking email and most people were only intermittently online via dial up. Collaborative apps would take another 8 or 9 years to really start to take off.
We had T-1 internet to every desk in ‘94 and I used dozens of networking apps from archie to veronica. Probably used CU SeeMe before a browser. Though Mosaic dropped around that time.
Advanced collaboration still in the future, this era was more like chat and file transfer. I think you could mark up Word docs from a network drive at some point.
