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...
Its funny that as soon as microsoft need to make an alterate UI for computers they always reach for the home as an analogy. Are they really that short of creativity that rooms full of stuff is all they can imagine computers as?!
If you look at their Metro UI that was very innovative, and looked a lot like "real stuff" less than the equivalent iPhone/Android UIs at the time, from memory.
I disagree. Metro UI was ugly, space wasting, and a blight on UI design. I even disliked it on mobile which it was arguably designed for.
Compared to random icons sprinkled across three or four screens? Metro was clean, fast and easily customized, the way a phone should be. The current Android/iPhone UIs are pure slop in comparison.
iPhone is just an evolution of PalmOS, and I think PalmOS was a great operating system all around, including UX.
Unfortunately, development experience (on PalmOS) didn't mirror the usage experience, though.
I actually liked it on mobile. Not fully: it was clunky and almost anti-aesthetic, but it worked, was easy to navigate (where implemented properly; I remember a date calc function that would show the years as a pop-up...) and was a fresh break from the trends at the time.
(Well, I'd better come out of the closet now: Yes, I had a Microsoft mobile phone. But I was not the only one!)
You think it looked more like "real stuff" than the contemporary iOS and Android designs?
Rooms with stuff are natural, we all live in them. And even Game devs tend to implement them as interfaces, because it's simple to understand for beginners and laymen. Any innovative interface has to build knowledge and understanding with the users first, and that usually fails.
I dont see Apple or Google using room based interfaces, it seems to just be Microsoft these days.
Please can you point out some games that do this? I cant find any.
FWIW I actually really enjoyed that VR Home concept, far more than any of the current ones. At the time that I had the headset that supported that and still ran windows I was enamored with the space and spent a lot of time in the loft space, the one at the top of the skyscraper.
I did as much of my computing in that space as possible, pulling up multiple desktop windows and floating applications and pinning them places. On one wall I had the Zune software with my whole music library, and my music played from that place, so I imported 3d models of speakers (I managed to actually find an end user use case for that default Windows user folder and I still as an admin and dev wonder why it's a default) and stuck them next to the app and they persisted. I'd drag discord around with me and I could even access the screen of my phone by bringing up Your Phone.
I found it really kind of nice to use, and I wish the space had been more capable. Able to take more object formats, able to handle more vertices, I wish I had been able to boot directly to the virtual environment and eschew the step of switching between desktop and virtual mode. It also visually paused basically every app and desktop you didn't specifically keep active, except for Zune--that would go into Mixview and look cool as hell on the wall.
I miss it, and I'm sad they killed it and I'm not aware of an experience like it for linux on an openish device atm.
And Jesus wept!
That video is 100% accurate of the feeling of VR in the 90's, both of the behaviour of the believers, the experience itself, and the reactions from the onlookers :)
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.
Was it Packard Bell Navigator?
Nah. This was much later and in full 3D.
Magellan was pretty cool. I think it shipped on Magnavox PCs in the 386 era.
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.
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...
Wait wait wait, Comic Sans was born in Microsoft Bob!? Way to bury the lead! That’s an incredible little origin story!
According to Wikipedia, it was intended for Bob, but wasn't actually used in it, and ultimately first appeared in "3D Movie Maker".
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.
Yes, I have only positive memories of it! Customizing the house was like a primitive version of The Sims.
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.
Ugh, Packard Bell. Being our first computer, we had no idea that Navigator program was pointless until months after. And I think it was another year before we realized it was capable of true color resolution (It shipped with 256 colors as the default).
Version 1.0 of Packard bell navigator in that video reminds me of the Macintosh "at ease" software I used to see in schools.
Totally off topic, I'm reminded that a high school friend gave me an old Packard bell machine for free once, and I ran OpenBSD on it for years. I got some ISA NICs and used it as a firewall.
Oh gawd I remember Mac "At Ease." That was the dumbed down lockdown software they used to make the computers at the school labs fun proof.
My father installed it on our family mac. I somehow discovered that by quickly rebooting twice, it would start the usual Finder shell instead, albeit in English instead of the configured Norwegian. Fun times.
Well, as a kid, I loved it.
It was probably awful but I didn’t care at all it had extreme 90´s vibes. All of my games were in a space room or whatever I remember. I was 6 or 7 and I discovered computers. Everything was cool. Packard Bell Navigator was in everything so it was cool :)
Yes it’s nostalgia.
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.
You just unlocked a core memory for me. I remember that house so well but haven't thought of it in decades!
“Adult Password” vs the much more common modern “Admin Password” is excellent
if Microsoft Bob was too cartoony for you, you could also go with a cartoony puppy, or a cartoon wizard!
I worked with a software developer who LOVED that puppy - way more than I loved MOPy fish (rip)
Petey the green bird, then gorilla was my buddy. Bonsai Buddy I think he was called!?
Ugh, I had forgotten all about that. I'll never get that creepy robotic "Day, z. Day, z" out of my head.
> 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-...
I really want this to be true, but Bob came on six floppy disks, far less than 30M.
It's entirely possible the disk images were just duplicated multiple times to get to 30M.
It was added by David Plummer, who explains how and why he did it.
On the other hand guy has history of lying and scamming the public https://www.atg.wa.gov/news/news-releases/attorney-general-s...
Is this why there was a copy of Weezer’s Buddy Holly music video was on there too?
IIRC that was the Windows 95 CD, not XP. Wikipedia seems to agree:
Missed the part about XP. Question still applies to the 95 disk.
The videos showed off Windows 95' multimedia prowess.
"Why did the Windows 95 CD have extra fun stuff, like the Good Times and Buddy Holly music videos, the Rob Roy trailer, and the cartoons by Bill Plympton? Because it was fun! Why does one have to justify having fun? In addition to the multimedia fun, there was also video game fun, with the addition of Pinball and the mercifully-forgotten hovercraft game Hover! (Some of us thought it was so awful, we secretly called it Hoover!)" -- Raymond Chen
> 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.
Without knowing the encryption key, it is just random data though. And since not even the creator knows, there sadly is no easter egg.
Isn't it still an easter egg though? Just one that is very hard to find.
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.
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.
Unlikely. Comic Chat project was not a high-budget project that could design its own font. Bob on the the other hand was, and according to Wikipedia did fund the development of Comic Sans: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comic_Sans
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.
So you knew your kids had been doing something they shouldn't.
It was meant to personalize settings on the family computer, not be Orange Book compliant.
To get people used to passwords
This seems most likely, I guess? A username without a password would suit for leaving a trace?
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.
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.
I believe it's a fairly popular font with dyslexics as well.
My mother was an early childhood teacher for decades and used it in everything she printed for her classes. I asked her why and she said it bore the closest resemblance to proper block print out of all the fonts available. I went through several bouts of unnecessary glyph modifications in my own handwriting when I was a kid because I thought various fonts looked cool so maybe there's something to it.
Personally I don't get the outrage. In my opinion the likes of Bradley Hand ITC and Papyrus are abused more often but nobody's ever accused me of having good taste ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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.
I think General Magic might've been onto something. From what I've seen, BOB looked so childish that it was likely insulting to adult users. General Magic had a crisper UI (partly because of the b/w nature of the devices) that felt more like the iconography of a late-80s copy machine.
I've got an old Sony Magic Link; one of the devices running the Magic Cap software. Both suffered from similar problems.
For starters the spacial interface is so cumbersome it makes all interactions with the system tedious. The first time you walk through the system it's cute but when you need to painstaking navigate to a particular room to do something it's just frustrating.
The hardware could not keep up with the demands of the interface. The PCs that shipped with Bob (in my experience) could not run it without paging and thus slowed to a crawl running it. Launching a program from Bob just resulted in interminable waits while the disk thrashed. The Magic Link is painfully slow and does not demonstrate the OS well at all.
Magic Cap was really no less insulting to users than Bob. It wasn't as cartoony but its tediousness wasted your time. The sluggishness of the hardware did not help. Even the early Newton MessagePads were snappier devices and their UI didn't make you tediously navigate through a virtual space.
> 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.
The Seattle / UW related branch of MSR definitely had a few wins in the graphics department.
As https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/meteoric-rise-... reminded me, they were on like 20% of the SIGGRAPH papers in 1996. And several have stood the test of time, like Hugues's Progressive Meshes paper (https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/237170.237216). A little later, the spherical harmonics paper (https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/566570.566612) was basically all MSR (I think Jan maybe interned there while at MPI? It's been a long time...).
That isn't to defend anything in AI, but it's not the case that they had no impact. The oral history thing there claims that the first grammar checking in Office 97 came from their NLP work.
Off the top of my head: differential privacy (which is now being deployed at scale), differential dataflow (Materialize), shared logs (Corfu/Tango, productized by VMWare). I'm sure there's many more that would be easy to google.
> 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.
You'd think that sort of thing would come out of the Developer division, not MSR.
This idea may just have needed better technology. We should try these things again.
There's a bunch of stuff that didn't really work that well 30 years ago that we use today
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.
How did blogspam with zero screenshots get upvoted? Actually seeing the product helps understand why it flopped.
The light-grey text on white background really enhances the vibe of the piece, too
"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.
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.
Bob was hilariously bad.
But I never got the impression it was more than a weird experiment, failed, but I dunno about "biggest flop" as the stakes weren't that high. 95 was coming and clearly the way forward.
It's a clickbait title.
If we were serious about biggest flops, we'd be talking about my beloved Lumia WP.
The Lumia series of phones had solid hardware but Windows Phone OS was crap, so the product line itself could never be competitive enough; I mean Nokia singlehandedly died at the braindead decision to go with Windows Phone and not Android. So if you're talking about phones, then I'd say it was Windows Phone OS that was the biggest flop, not the hardware.
Windows Phone OS was really slick actually, I used a Lumia with it for a long time. I loved live tiles, very good idea on a phone.
Microsoft's stewardship over their entire smartphone campaign, however, was so miserable, it's kind of impressive.
I would argue that Nokia phones with windows OS was pretty successful. Everyone I know who had an early Lumia loved it.
It was the purchase of Nokias mobile division by Microsoft that killed it.
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.
> [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.
Pedantically (also semi-curiously) the Matrox M3d didn't need passthrough. Not sure of specific mechanics but AFAIR it was a flat blank slot cover.
> 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.
NGL 3DO Blaster (and NV1 Stuff to an extent) is a good call out. I also almost listed MPEG cards but I think they had various industrial uses (maybe?)
Then once Creative made a decent UI for an MP3 player, Apple goes yoink, look at this innovative iPod.
And yet they couldn't even 'get the message' to really fix their pricing model one way or another to keep Sandisk from eating a good chunk of (if not overtaking them in) most of the 'non Apple flash storage' player market.
They were a company that thrived on a combination of clever mis-marketing [0] and poor reseller treatment [1]. Their actions likely hurt the evolution of computer audio due to the capture of various patents and companies that were actually innovating (Ensoniq being the big one.) I mean FFS it took VIA and and upstart to finally raise the bar [2] in a meaningful way, and the overall lack of competition left Creative ill-prepared to handle Azalia.
[0] - i.e. Audigy settlement.
[1] - When I worked at a computer shop, around 2001 we established a rule, 'no creative product under 50$ retail will be worth the cost of trying to RMA it'. If an SBLive or 52x CD drive came in bad we'd try but if it didn't get through on first go you'd wind up in a loop where the labor time wasn't worth replacing one. Which makes me extra disgusted because that's what everyone does now with actual end consumers.
[2] - That said, that VIA/IC Ensemble did the Envy24 thing when they did is interesting, at least in the context of the XBox 360 using an SIS 'Southbridge'. Makes me wonder if they were being bold to get the bid instead?
I guess the Rendition Vérité accelerator cards are also contenders.
I was afraid to go down the rabbit hole of 3D Accelerator dead-ends... admittedly because I'd diverge into weird tangents.
I'm willing to 'write-off' most early proprietary API cards, OTOH 3d Blaster VLB was so memory holed that if it wasn't for LGR I'd thought it was a Mandela effect hallucination...
The Jaz Drive seemed pretty good, just twice as expensive as needed.
I knew a couple people who had one and it was really handy, nothing comparable (except switching actual hard disks) existed, for a brief moment in time - must have been around 1998-99, no ubiquitous USB sticks, no CDRW yet (only CDR, at 5 bucks a piece).
Us plebs had to make do with 100MB parallel port zip drives.
Some Jaz Drives suffered from problems that could vaguely sound like (but were fairly physically different from) Click-Of-Death. We had an early one, they got announced around 95 and I think we got one in 97 to replace tapes... alas when we actually needed to read data... Dad had to redo all his MIDIs because of that one. (Ironically none of our Zip drives failed and he used one up sometime between Vista and Win10... I think the same one...) [0][1].
> no CDRW yet (only CDR, at 5 bucks a piece).
IIRC Jaz cartridges were expensive back then, 100$ a pop. Launch price of 100$, back then 500$ could buy you a car that might last through an oil change or two. [1]
That said, The Castlewood Orb was a far more interesting piece of machinery due to capacity/cost. I have never seen one, but I do have a SyJet somewhere that I never hooked up to a PC [2]
[0] - FWIW the Jaz in question was a SCSI model with parallel port adapter. Not sure if it makes a difference...
[1] - It took a long time to fully reclaim my dad's confidence in purchase suggestions, wasn't finally conquered till a year after he ditched a problematic Chrysler Sebring for a Chevrolet Malibu (at which point he said I was glad I suggested it. Which I'm eternally grateful for...)
[2] - Got it used cheap way back when, I preferred SCSI CDRWs and thus had at least one competent Adaptec card for the task and a colleague was like 'hey since you can use it...'
I managed to get my hands on a Turbo Graphics 16 console. Zero complaints. Bonks Adventure was so fun. It never took off.
Well didn’t OS/2 HPFS inspire NTFS?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS#History
They borrowed features from HPFS.
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.
I recently read the story of the Magic Link: https://commoncog.com/c/cases/general-magic/
> When General Magic finally shipped in 1994 — under the threat of Apple’s Newton — they hadn’t made the Pocket Crystal that Porat first dreamed of in 1989. Instead, they released something they called the Sony Magic Link. It weighed 1.5 lbs (0.68 kg) and was priced at US$800 (US$1560 in 2022 dollars). It offered futuristic features like a touchscreen, downloadable apps and animated emojis — the first of its kind. Fadell thought it would be revolutionary — people could now carry a personal computer with them wherever they went. But nobody bought it. In the end only three to four thousand Magic Link devices were sold, and mostly to family and friends.
There's a documentary too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTdyb-RWNKo
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.
Clippy came from Bob. The tech was called Microsoft Agent.
Ah, interesting. I didn't know that.
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?
My grandpa has MSN as an ISP and would dial in using a fully featured, very blue windowed program that had everything Internet in it. I remember thinking it was pretty cool.
Now I feel old, lol
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.
> what do other folks think is a better candidate for the biggest flop [in tech] of the 1990s?
The CueCat.
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.
It's a weirder sort of flop though.
But it was a flop.
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.
Maybe Germany is an outlier, but ISDN for telephony (less for internet) was still huge until.. I dunno, 2010? 2015? That's nearly 15 years of being the default solution for smaller companies. (and also bigger ones, and also private households)
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.
Microsoft Mira was a failure with production units shipped by 3rd parties.
That’s insane they thought a more expensive tablet was a market as opposed to a stand alone tablet.
The remote viewing is coming back though. PlayStation Portal comes to mind which is just a remote controller and screen for a PS5. It’s considerably cheaper than the full device, of course, because that would be insane if it weren’t, _Microsoft_
What's even better is that the Mira tablet simply RDP'ed into a Windows XP Pro machine. Had to be Pro, because RDP. Locks out the local console, because RDP.
It was slow over 802.11b (I beta tested two of the devices).
>Locks out the local console, because RDP.
Windows is perfectly capable of hosting multiple sessions, Microsoft just wants to charge you double the cost of a Windows license per session on a separate server tier of OS license.
Of course, it wouldn't have saved the device if Microsoft had bent their rules for themselves...
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.
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.
I have a vague recollection of a piece of software distributed by Bank of America in the mid-to-late 90s that featured an interface similar to Microsoft Bob. From what I remember, it was similar to Quicken. Was never able to find any information about it, and granted I was probably 5 when I found it on the family PC so the memory is a little fuzzy, but seeing these old design languages from that era of computing is always neat.
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).
I have a pristine shrink-wrapped copy of Microsoft Bob on my office shelf next to my shrink-wrapped copy of MS 3D Movie Maker.
There is a shrink wrapped box of Bob on display at the Computer Museum of America in Roswell, Georgia (Metro Atlanta).
Being slow is pretty bad but I have a suspicion that the name alone was bad enough to doom it.
Seems like Steve Jobs made the vision of a computer that absolutely anyone could use a reality with the IPhone. It would be interesting to see the design process of the IPhone and Bob side by side. What were the differences in methodology that lead to one being a disaster and the other being a legendary success.
I have elder relatives who have trouble using the iPhone, in particular after the flat UI was introduced with iOS 7. The UI and behavior can be quite inscrutable.
Agreed and I have witnessed many users struggling with all modern UIs. Android and iOS are far too much for most people if they have to do anything more than opening an app. To make it worse, the UIs are always changing drmatically.
I'm gonna have to be "that guy" here, because the contrast on this page is so low that I can barely read it :(
What about Actimates?
Now back with AI and a new name.
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:
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.
But filesystems aren't going away, free and direct access to them are just being taken from us.
You have to be old to have lived when man walked on the moon.
>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.
> The only real innovation was the iPhone, but it’s just a more responsive multi touch palm, to some degree.
You can’t just treat this as a throwaway line. Touch interfaces signal a fundamental shift in the way people interact with computers. You just take swipes and gestures for granted. Have you watched a senior try to interact with the modern web? The interface is not only the buttons of the browser, but the page itself. Today we have shifting interfaces that move because of lazy load ads. We have popups that one needs to understand how to close. We have essential functions buried behind an arbitrary “hamburger” menu icon. We have sites that hijack the back button. Sites that deliberately try to deceive. And lots of software (including Microsoft apps) has shifted to a cloud model. This becomes an inextricable aspect of the interface itself. Suddenly, there’s no means to “save” and old “digital paper” model/metaphors have given way to “infinite web page” documents.
I spend a lot of time with seniors and see firsthand the roadbumps and dead ends they face.
That's a weird take, we have enough stories of people growing up with mobile phones having less of a clue about desktop OSes than people aged 30-60. We have other people (seniors now) who never really clicked with computers in the 90s-2010. There are so many groups who would fall into the category of benefitting from this.
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.
"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?
You misunderstand what I was saying, not that the Bob program transformed into what we now know as AR like the one Meta is designing.
Rather that these metaphors were very present in 2000s Windows and Office programs, and were very successful in getting regular users to understand computers and bringing about the Personal Computer revolution.
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.)
> Does anyone still remember why we got computers in the first place?
Uhhhh, to play videogames?
(That was the Beavis 'n Butthead voice.)
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?
I'm interested in specifics if you remember them. What Xerox system, are we talking an Operating system? A mainframe? A computer + OS package? An office program?
And what were the metaphors specifically, folders or cutting and pasting?
Thanks.
I'm pretty sure that it was one of these: https://spectrum.ieee.org/xerox-alto
It had folders, a mouse, document icons, and a trash can.
I can't really remember much else. It was B&W.
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.
