The extended Apple+IBM Taligent demo I saw in early-1990s was impressive and also stylish.
It let you do things that seemed beyond the current convention with OO GUI toolkits and application frameworks. And there was also a bit of humor: I recall some demo of example application for some business approval workflow having something like an animation of a rubber stamp thumbs up, which was a real crowd-pleaser.
(This was around when a handful of Internet nerds and university students started trying Mosaic (maybe Netscape Navigator was also out?), but Web browsers at the time were mostly just a subset of LaTeX article.sty hypertext on a gray background, without even tables or frames, much less JS and CSS. So even those aware of the Web were still thinking non-Web-browser desktop applications, or writing a Web hypertext browser.)
It let you do things that seemed beyond the current convention with OO GUI toolkits and application frameworks. And there was also a bit of humor: I recall some demo of example application for some business approval workflow having something like an animation of a rubber stamp thumbs up, which was a real crowd-pleaser.
(This was around when a handful of Internet nerds and university students started trying Mosaic (maybe Netscape Navigator was also out?), but Web browsers at the time were mostly just a subset of LaTeX article.sty hypertext on a gray background, without even tables or frames, much less JS and CSS. So even those aware of the Web were still thinking non-Web-browser desktop applications, or writing a Web hypertext browser.)