Seems KDE was founded in October 1996 (according to Wikipedia), not sure what this means about the age of Konsole.
The first Konsole commit on git has a Changelog which goes back to April 1998, but that already has version number 0.8.6 (https://cgit.kde.org/konsole.git/diff/ChangeLog?id=d8f741181... ), so it's not implausible that you would have a Konsole in 1996 or shortly after.
For some time I've wanted to fish out early builds of popular/established furniture like KDE and GNOME to track how they've developed over the years. There are old screenshots online and that gets 99% there but being able to leave a trail of functioning VMs in my wake would be cool.
windowmaker has a different icon (although that could be changed) but more so the icon at the bottom to the left of the recycling bin, is fiend, an app that allowed you to put dock icons everywhere on the screen and supported virtual desktops of some form, if i remember correctly.
since windowmaker didn't implement the dock in the same way, porting fiend didn't make much sense. instead, it features a clip that includes desktop switching in its icon. the GWorkspace implemention for GNUstep also adds fiend features right in, and looks slightly different, so it is quite unlikely that this is anything but a genuine NeXTStep desktop.
in 1996 NeXTStep was still in active use and development and also available for intel PCs. (the last release was 1997. it was supported until 2002) (myself, i was using NeXT workstations until 2005)
This was 1996. Did KDE exist then?