Microsoft never really left the dream of creating Bob behind. If you look at their Virtual Reality Portal it is basically a modern version of Bob where you start in a livingroom and need to go into into other rooms to perform certain task. To start apps you eg. need to pick them from a book shelf. Essential the same a Bob.
A few images for reference. Notice that you start MS Paint same way in the VR portal and Bob.
VR Portal: https://onewindows.es/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/windows-mix...
Bob: https://static1.howtogeekimages.com/wordpress/wp-content/upl...
And Jesus wept!
I remember once buying a graphics card that included one of these virtual environments where files were on shelves, etc. Wish I could remember its name.
First Windows computer I ever used had something like this, called Packard Bell Navigator. It was... interesting but ultimately an annoyance to use.
Looking at screenshots, Bob appears to be a more childish and cartoony version of the concept. I can see why it didn't fair well.
https://youtu.be/pwTIbYV_q6I around the 12 to 13 minute mark shows the Navigator interface.
The first computer that I bought (in 8th grade, after saving for a couple of years) had Packard Bell Navigator. It was a sort of full-screen program in Windows 95 that you'd use to launch other programs, although it could do a few other things in-app.
It was ... odd. I opened it once or twice and deleted it.
We had Bob in an attempt to make my technophobic mother capable of using the computer.
My main memory of it was that it allowed you to add shortcuts to other installed programs, so I added the few games on the computer to Bob. This used way too many resources, causing Bob to crash and me being unable to get into my profile to fix it. It may have broken the program for anyone else using it too, I can't recall. Relatively standard behavior crashing the program far beyond their target market's ability to fix it.
> Microsoft included an encrypted copy of Bob on Windows XP installation CDs to waste space to discourage piracy.
This feels like an urban legend made up after the fact.
It would be way easier to just generate random bytes, and nobody could ever tell the difference.
Especially since no decryption key exists.
It's just a funnier story if that's the only thing Bob was ever good for...
> This feels like an urban legend made up after the fact.
Raymond Chen of Microsoft has this to say about that:
"... [the person adding 30 megs of random crap] could have just called the CryptGenRandom function to generate 30 megabytes of cryptographically random bytes, but where's the fun in that? Instead, he dug through the archives and found a copy of Microsoft Bob. He took all the floppy disk images and combined them into one big file. The contents of the Microsoft Bob floppy disk images are not particularly random, so he decided to scramble up the data by encrypting it. When it came time to enter the encryption key, he just smashed his hand haphazardly across the keyboard and out came an encrypted copy of Microsoft Bob. That's what went into the unused space as ballast data on the Windows XP CD..."[0]
[0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/technet-...
> It would be way easier to just generate random bytes, and nobody could ever tell the difference.
Programmers love easter eggs.
Edit: sillywalk's comment proves my point.
Melinda gates was more than just the product's marketing manager, she was in charge of the whole project.
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/29/the-lesson-melinda-gates-lea...
I broke my dad’s computer editing the registry to configure Microsoft Bob to display “the computer is a toy, not a tool” at the top. He had to call an older kid from church to come over and fix it. I was hoping that kid would be impressed and rightfully got nothing. Good memories.
It gave us Comic Sans, which had a notable impact on culture. I wouldn't call that a flop.
Comic Sans was from Microsoft Comic Chat [1], which was a separate product from Bob.
It also gave us the world’s greatest example of poorly thought through security practices.
You can set a password on your Bob account. If you fail to enter the right password three times in a row, Microsoft Bob lets you reset the password, no further questions.
It was a shell atop of Windows 3.x on a FAT16-formatted drive. Like 9x, the user account was only for personalization, not security.
What?? What was the point, even?
Anyone can get in, but nobody can get in without leaving evidence behind.
To get people used to passwords
So you knew your kids had been doing something they shouldn't.
The funeral director at my father’s funeral used comic sans for everything.
A flop no but used hilariously for a things it shouldn’t be. One of the most divisive typefaces ever.
I like it.
I believe it's a fairly popular font with dyslexics as well.
That's hilariously bad. Our sweet old lady office manager 2 jobs ago used comic sans for every announcement.
Babies and new employees and that sort of thing it was fine. But using it for death notices of employees family members, with frowny face emojis, was a bit much. She was so sweet, but so very very oblivious.
Us kids loved it. Spent a lot of time configuring rooms, theming them, exploring all the features. The most intriguing one was a mailroom, but that's because it asked to configure your modem and email server settings which I couldn't do. Had separate profiles for each of us in the family and our friends; but we soon learned you could reset anyone's password by saying you forgot it. Once the griefing started it lost some appeal, but I still have only fond memories of MS Bob.
General Magic and Magic Cap [1] are not mentioned in this article.
If you know anything about Microsoft, you know they don't innovate. That was true in the 90's when Bill Gates was running Microsoft, and it is true under Nadella. Anything they do is ALWAYS in response to a competitive threat. So what was the competitive threat that spurred Microsoft Bob? It was the "social interface" of General Magic's Magic Cap operating system. When that flopped Microsoft cancelled Bob.
> If you know anything about Microsoft, you know they don't innovate.
Longhorn failed because MS tried to be too innovative within the scope of a single OS release. In some ways Microsoft was more innovative under Ballmer than Nadella--see e.g. the radical Midori OS that Nadella killed, or Microsoft Research's highly productive Silicon Valley campus that Nadella shut down.
> Microsoft Research's highly productive Silicon Valley campus
What are some notable examples of innovations that came from MSR Silicon Valley campus? In my opinion nothing notable has ever come out of MSR, regardless of campus. Microsoft is needing to rely on third parties such as OpenAI because MSR seems incapable of contributing anything notable to AI.
> In my opinion nothing notable has ever come out of MSR, regardless of campus.
One notable thing that came out of the Cambridge (England) campus was the implementation of generics in the CLR.
This reminds me of my first computer in 1994, a Compaq Presario 486 DX4 100MHz that came with TabWorks.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/TabWorks
https://archive.org/download/tabworks/Windows3.12018-12-30At...
Developed by XSoft, a division of Xerox PARC!
What a trip, I remember as a 10 yo kid I quickly uninstalled it when I learned to do so.
It felt like bloat and I wanted a clean Windows 95 interface.
I switched to Mac in 2006 with MacOS Tiger and never looked back.
"And then they released Microsoft Bob. They should have named it Microsoft Bomb, because it bombed. But if you take one letter out of Bomb, you get Bob. So they almost got it right."
So proud of this one they had to explicity point it out. Thank you though, I never would have made that connection.
Let's use the clickbait title as a brainstorming prompt: what do other folks think is a better candidate for the biggest flop [in tech] of the 1990s?
Also, I kind of wish Microsoft Bob failed a little harder— the agentic stuff I'm hearing about these days sounds like the kind of software assistants they tried in the 90s, and I fear they have the same likelihood of poor execution.
> what do other folks think is a better candidate for the biggest flop [in tech] of the 1990s?
VAX 9000, OS/2 2.0, OS/2 Warp 3, OpenDoc, Kaleida, Apple Newton, Pippin, 3DO, Philips CD-i, Sega 32X, Sega Saturn, Atari Jaguar, Amiga CD32…
Oh if we're going through that sort of list....
- Virtual Boy, Atari Lynx,
Hardware:
- AMD Interwave. practically ruined Gravis and left us with years of Creative gobbling up any competitor i.e. Ensoniq, Aureal... FFS we had to wait for VIA to make something competitive to Creative's offerings, outside of 3-ish beautiful Cirrus Logic 4624/4630 cards, before the Envy24 became a thing.
- Speaking of Cirrus Logic, The Laguna CL-GD546X series of chips; those things used RDRAM in the mid-90s and it contributed to Cirrus exiting the video market.
- Speaking of Creative, the 3D Blaster VLB. They exist, (heck IDEK if the original rebel moon came any other way,) but they are rare as hell which means they probably flopped hard.
- (Kinda) the Matrox M3d (and the VideoLogic counterpart). It wasn't a terrible product in and of itself but a Riva 128 was faster (if uglier) for most cases and gave you 2D as well, and they came out around the same time. [0]
- Most 'cartridge disk' drives aside from the Zip[1]. You can possibly throw SuperDisk/HiFD into this category too.
- Intel i820 Chipset (It's 1999!). I'm not referring to the 'lemon' aspect (i.e. when an MTH was used for SDRAM, the RDRAM was reliable... AFAIK with two slots instead of 3) but in general there was almost zero uptake due to the cost of RDRAM and Intel's recalcitrance led to both AMD gaining ground as well as VIA/SiS getting opportunities to be more competitive in the chipset space (SiS 630 was cheaper than 810E and just as good for normal users, Via's Apollo Pro 133A both supported 133Mhz FSB and gave an AGP slot, as well as IDE corruption with an SBLive... I think i815 was 4-6 months after VIA stuff was selling, and remember back then 6 months was an eternity...)
Also I should note that the Saturn was mostly a flop in the US (Can't speak for EU.) but in Japan it held up well thanks to native publishers, the Saturn had a lot of great 2D games we never saw here, (thanks to the same guy that ironically caused the relative dearth of good RPGs for the PS1 before he moved from Sony to Sega...) also the ability to play CD+G (gotta have that karaoke) and I think? it could do VCDs which were bigger over there... all that stuff helped a lot and the Saturn outsold there till around 1997 IIRC.
[0] - That said, wow, remember when 3d processors didn't even need a heatsink? I feel old...
[1] - Zip had reliability problems, but certainly was not a flop.
> Speaking of Creative, the 3D Blaster VLB. They exist, (heck IDEK if the original rebel moon came any other way,) but they are rare as hell which means they probably flopped hard.
I just had to check to see if you meant 3DO Blaster and not just 3D Blaster. I'd imagine both are very rare.
> [0] - That said, wow, remember when 3d processors didn't even need a heatsink? I feel old...
And we had VGA passthrough cables, because 2D rendering was still taken care of by a discrete card.
Well didn’t OS/2 HPFS inspire NTFS?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS#History
They borrowed features from HPFS.
Clippy the Office Assistant. Similar idea to Bob, but more irritating.
Also, The Microsoft Network. This was a competitor to AOL that came out just as the WWW was exploding. It gave us the "MSN" abbreviation that we still see today, but otherwise disappeared without a trace.
https://youtu.be/5DqJwmzG6Fk?si=5oUEH0YiwZFCaYO0
Well, almost without a trace. Unfortunately?
I always wonder was MSN ever actually a thing or did Microsoft pull it / replace it before it reached the market? I know plenty of people who used AOL or CompuServe, but never met anyone who used the original MSN.
You mean the full internet experience in one window thing like the aol browser? I’m pretty sure I used to use it, light blue thing and hotmail a more seemless integration?
I think you might be right that it was pulled before it was available to the general public. I never saw it in the wild.
Clippy came from Bob. The tech was called Microsoft Agent.
Ah, interesting. I didn't know that.
I'd think "Synchronys SoftRAM" could be considered a bigger flop in terms of the actual quality of the product, but it was a successful scam.
Hmm.
WebTV might be up there, similar for Monorail PC.
Both fairly quickly got obsoleted and any 'volume' they hoped to reach in consumer space was quickly cannibalized by similar but more profitable models (i.e. E-Machines and their steep internet contract discounts.)
Nx586 was a bit of a flop as a product on its own (even funder Compaq didnt really ship many) but overall the R&D transformed AMD when they acquired NexGen and used the second iteration of the tech for the K6.
A whole bunch of telecom technologies like WAP (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Application_Protocol), ISDN (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISDN) and ATM (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asynchronous_Transfer_Mode). Thankfully too since they were ugly, closed and expensive.
Is WAP really considered a failure? Or just a transitional technology for an era of low-powered mobile devices? I downloaded my fair share of games and ringtones from "wap dot" sites.
Similar for ISDN. At least over here it was a successful and important solution for many people, not only for data access, but it was als the way to get multiple lines, caller id, etc. activated.
Of course DSL and other techs took over, but it was far from a failure.
> what do other folks think is a better candidate for the biggest flop [in tech] of the 1990s?
The CueCat.
It's a weirder sort of flop though.
But it was a flop.
What qualifies as being from the 90s? The CueCat was definitely underdevelopment in the 90s but wasn’t publicly released until 2000.
IBM's Workplace OS was a couple $Billion flop.
I'd also add Network Computers and "push technology" e.g. Pointcast.
Bigger assistant/agent flop of the nineties was General Magic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Magic Packed with smartest engineers and usability people from the valley. Idea was to use smart remote agents "working for the user". Burned $200mil of 1995 money developing absolutely nothing usable.
Bring back a version of this to help aging seniors deal with increasingly complex interfaces.
Seniors today were professionals using technology 20 years ago.
In many ways interfaces have remained pretty static since then.
The only real innovation was the iPhone, but it’s just a more responsive multi touch palm, to some degree.
We still use windowing computers with mice/trackpad and keyboard, have pocket computers with apps and touch screens, and interface with more less the same browser with URL bar.
We maybe are on cusp of VR and that will be a sea change in interfaces, if it ever comes to pass. And voice commands, but pretty limited function so far
That’s from the 90s to today.
Compare that to 60s to 90s, where you barely had desktop calculators, and used magnetic tape and maybe punch card inputs:
>Seniors today were professionals using technology 20 years ago.
This is correct. Folks, VisiCalc was introduced in 1979, when today's ninety-year-olds were 44. They had not even lived half their current life.
We're probably heading for a future where seniors know what a filesystem (and other concepts we take for granted) is and younger generations don't because they've been trained to use iOS and Android fully.
Just as the youth from that time has no idea what punch cards and tapes are. ;)
Except... file systems are still there and if you want to be anything more than a user (or "creator"), you need to know about them.
I remember when the first iPad came out, and the tech press marveled at how easily seniors could understand it. This no longer applies to modern iOS.
We don’t necessarily need Bob. We just need an iOS 1 mode, skeuomorphic design and all. Back when the camera app only had a photo or video switch, a take photo button, and a gallery button.
Maybe not skeuomorphic design, but they have a simplified mode: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/assistive-access-iphon...
> We don’t necessarily need Bob. We just need an iOS 1 mode
But web developers have done their best to wreck this. Have you ever had to explain GDPR cookie dialogs to elderly parents? I've watched them Google recipes only to blame the chef when the site was broken or unusable, which was more often than not.
But that's not due to web developers. They merely execute what some business people ask them to do in order to make people consent to something they don't want to consent to and making them angry about the EU presumably causing this, while it's completely up to the ad industry. They could make it a lot simpler or even reduce their surveillance.
that's an idea - a version of it on social media to remind them to go out and touch grass instead of believing every conspiracy theory.
Bob is always easily criticized but it was actually a fun and cute software that included the basic versions of what a lot of people needed, like a Word Processor that wasn’t at the same level as Works (or Office). Almost everyone who makes fun of it never used it. But it was an early mash up of a few different things that all survive in various ways in other products. For example the home in Bob, which is often the main thing people make fun of, draws on the same fun people get when they’re designing spaces in the sims or whatever else.
What about Actimates?
The product manager for Bob, Melinda French, would go on to marry Bill Gates, which goes a long way to explaining why Bob was the fetch that Microsoft kept trying to make happen. Its cutesy avatar technology would go on to power Clippy, the Windows XP search dog (actually a 3D version of one of the Bob characters), and be available as an API for use by third parties (most famously Bonzi Buddy).
Being slow is pretty bad but I have a suspicion that the name alone was bad enough to doom it.
The nerd emoji and the Clippy like assistants come from Microsoft Bob.
Another interesting product from that era was Microsoft Comic Chat, an IRC client that rendered conversations as a comic.
"Microsoft Bob presented screens showing a house, with rooms that the user could visit containing familiar objects corresponding to computer applications, such as a desk with pen and paper and a checkbook. Clicking on the pen and paper would open the system’s word processor"
Seems like some aspects of the experiment survived and were hugely popular: folders, clipboard, cut, paste, etc..
MS Bob didn’t invent those things. It just grafted them onto a crude gui metaphor that tech companies are still trying to find a buyer for: “What if the UX was as close as possible to the physical world?”
You don’t open a file, you “walk” to a “filing cabinet”, “pull the drawer out”, and “reach in and pull out a specific piece of ‘paper’”.
You don’t make a phone call, you sit in virtual meeting space with virtual bodies while wearing a mocap suit.
Does anyone still remember why we got computers in the first place?
Virtual reality people are still trying to deliver this "vison". I remember first cringe idea of how a web shopping would work by rendering physical supermarket shelves with VRML and users having to walk the aisles full of 3d modeled products. I think it was by Walmart? and they didnt stop with that one demo, here another try from 2017 https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2022/1/5/22868323/walmart-meta...
Oh wow, I just realized that the following VR parody might have been inspired by Microsoft Bob :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4FGzE4endQ
(2015, so 4 years before Zuckerberg committed to the Metaverse enough to rename the whole company, and still 1 year before the first commercial new generation VR headset : Oculus Rift released.)
Those predated Bob, by a long time.
I remember encountering them in an old Xerox system, in the early 1980s.
Bob was awful. However, I have to confess that I once tried designing UI like that, and learned painful lessons, in the process.
Does anyone know of a paradigm original to Microsoft Bob that survived? Other than Rover the Windows XP search dog.
Does marrying the CEO count?
Those things were all totally standard and normal by the time Microsoft Bob came along
Those concepts were invented at Xerox PARC in the 1970s; certainly UNIX had them before MS windows, and "bob" was just a windows application anyway.
I think Bob was more (in)famous as the product which served as the origin story for Clippy in MS Office.
