No, not really.

Remember that Windows 1.0 was a primitive sort of tiling window system, because Microsoft was afraid of being sued by Apple and did not dare implement overlapping windows.

What you are seeing is a strip of the desktop background, which contains icons representing running programs. The tiling algorithm leaves a strip of "desktop" visible so that you can get to the program icons. This is how you switched between programs.

Windows 2 reintroduced tiling windows, but had no desktop icons as such -- again, it was afraid of being too like classic MacOS. This meant that you could rearrange windows, and so see the desktop. That in turn made it clearer that programs minimized to the desktop, as nothing else could be on the desktop.

This can be seen clearly if you look at screenshots of the work-in-progress test versions of "Windows Chicago", e.g. https://sites.google.com/site/chicagowin95/index -- this is what was to be Windows 4.0 but was renamed Windows 95.

For instance, in this one: https://sites.google.com/site/chicagowin95/index/chicago40

... you can see some running program's icons sitting _on top of_ the prototype taskbar.

There was no separate container for program icons. The taskbar was invented _de novo_ in Windows 95, and subsequent to the invention of the taskbar, icons representing running programs were moved into it.