Yeah, I also remember E16.. Seems like Rasterman was the first one who made icons, that represent the content of file, and those transparent window titles and other decorations. And pseudo-transparent ETerm. Now we have all that in Gnome, but back then it was a feeling of going into the right direction.
Nowadays it must be a great product, because it was made with vision, for themselves, re-implementing cleanly and consistently all the layers from the very foundation, with attention to every detail. These are landmarks of a remarkable opensource product.
Heck from what I remember, half of the compsiting stuff that's done now with compiz/kwin in modern desktops was pioneered with E17 development, they used Xgl before the accelerated compositing was possible with GLX_texture_from_pixmap and the like.
Nowadays it must be a great product, because it was made with vision, for themselves, re-implementing cleanly and consistently all the layers from the very foundation, with attention to every detail. These are landmarks of a remarkable opensource product.
Someday I will replace my Gnome.)