My parents had an appliance/electronics shop when I was growing up and they took used items on trade occasionally. Someone turned in one of those zenith sets and I actually got to use that remote. Bear in mind we were well into the age of infrared remotes by this point (late 80s).
It was definitely interesting and I think I could just distinguish the difference between the sounds of the buttons.
The first version of Plex was a port of parts of the Xbox program XBMC to MacOS X (which has a lot more in common with Linux than Windows) - you can still see this history in the paths where Plex installs to on Linux. I’m not sure where you heard that it was originally designed to run on Windows.
There was a YouTube documentary where a dude tracked down the location where this photo was taken.