May 8, 2013 • 43 mins
What was Microsoft Bob? What was the major security flaw in Bob? Why did Bob flop? Join Jonathan and Lauren as they explore the rise and fall of Microsoft Bob.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Get in touch with technology with tex Stuff from how
stuff dot com Either everyone, and welcome to tech Stuff.
I'm Jonathan Strickland and I'm Lauren Obama. Today we're going
to talk about something that a listeners sent in. This
is JP from New Jersey who wrote, Hey, Jonathan and Lauren,
(00:25):
I wanted to see if you guys would consider doing
a podcast about history success, parentheses, Sara kas and closed
their entheses, and eventual downfall of Microsoft. Bob keep up
the great shows. Thanks JP. We're gonna tackle Bob and
we're gonna wrestle him to the ground and probably give
him noogies. But then so did the rest of the world. Yeah,
(00:45):
if you don't know what Bob is, don't feel badly
about it. It was one of the biggest flops in
Microsoft history, I think, one of the biggest flops and
kind of history period. Time did this list of the
fifty worst inventions ever Time Magazine. Time Magazine, Yeah, back
in back, and Bob was on there. I mean, along
with like tanning beds and hydrogen blimps. Yeah, hydrogen blimps
(01:10):
not such a great thing Microsoft. Bob possibly worse. It's
killed killed fewer people killed fewer people, but people dreams
died that day when Microsoft Bob came out that this
was an interface for Windows three point one, and then
later came out, yeah it was. It was also for
Windows in t So here's the thing, here's the thing.
(01:30):
We're talking about era where the personal computer is starting
to get some serious traction but still is not in
most homes. In fact, Microsoft, when they were talking about
designing Bob and the launch of Bob, they were predicting
that by I think it was seven that PCs would
be in forty six percent of households, and and and
this was that this was a forty six percent in
(01:51):
the incredible future. The idea of being is a really
big number that Microsoft is crazy to think that that
many people would have computers. Well, the problem that Microsoft
had identified as something that they needed to solve with
brute force is that that someone who is unfamiliar with
computers might find the operation of such a device to
(02:13):
be intimidating and difficult, and the learning curve might be
too too steep for your average person who was not
already familiar with computers. And certainly before Windows three point
one came out, when it was just doss on say
just doss operation. You know, I'm simply saying that it
was perhaps not the most friendly thing to greet a
(02:34):
person just just lines of code on a screen. I
didn't need a friend, I needed an operating system. That's
what Does gave me. And that's kind of that is
kind of what what McIntosh was doing at the time.
And and and Apple was was kind of kicking a
lot of button that arena because they were giving people
something more friendly, more user friendly, and a little bit
more intuitive, right and keep in minding of course, Apple
(02:55):
had a big jump on other computers because the Apple
to a very popular personal computer among mostly hobbyists and
people who were interested in computers. Because again that was
that was in the line command days, we had the
type stuff in is when Apple introduced the Macintosh and
the graphics user interface. Apple of course was not the
the company to invent the graphic excuser interface, but they
(03:18):
were the first ones to really successfully implement it in
a personal computer platform, and people liked it. It was
one of those things where things just made more sense.
It was it was it was a little more intuitive
than having to type and memorize all these different commands
that you would type into just get your computer to
do stuff. Well, Microsoft wanted to kind of um create
(03:40):
its own graphic unit user interface, and that was the
genesis of the Windows program. But even then they thought,
there's gotta be a way of making this simpler for
the average person. Now, to really look at the development
of Bob, you have to go back a few years
before Bob was a thing. And so back in nine
Microsoft launched a program called Microsoft Publisher. It's a desktop
(04:02):
publishing program and it was the first program from Microsoft
that included Wizards. Now, wizards are not you know, it's
not Harry Potter coming out and waving a wan saying
regard um leviosa or a laho mora or uh avauta cadavera.
It's instead a little a little help pop up. Yeah,
(04:22):
that's supposed to guide you through a complicated process step
by step. So this was a big help for someone
who maybe was not familiar with this particular process or
very rarely used it. And uh and could just follow
along on the directions as opposed to having to thumb
through a four page manual, right and and and Microsoft
(04:42):
Publisher was was pretty popular. It was designed by Karen
Fries and Barry Lynnette, Yeah, and Karen Fryes is going
to become important in a little bit and uh. And
right when when they were you know, they had finished
with publisher, it was out in the world, it was
doing great, and they were like, what else can we do?
What is our next project? We want to keep helping newbs.
I'm not sure if Neubs was a yeah, no, but
that's that's that's exactly you know, we're going to translate
(05:03):
it for the kids of today. We're really the kids
of about six seven years ago. But anyway, yes, uh,
they wanted to continue to develop software that would help
people who otherwise would be unfamiliar and maybe intimidated by software.
So that's when they started to look into the possibility
of developing a full graphics user interface designed with these
(05:27):
nudes in mind. Originally they were calling it Data Wizard,
and then that eventually had the code name Utopia, but
by the time it was finally going to launch, it
had of course changed to Microsoft Bob is designed as
an alternative interface, as as Lauren said earlier, for Windows
three point one and even Windows and Team It's supported
(05:48):
programs designed for Bob, so it supported its own programs
designed for that operating system or rather that user interface. Uh.
It also supported Windows programs and supported DOS programs. So
the idea was that this would be able to support
anything that a person would want to run on a PC.
(06:09):
So but but you know, through through this filter that
would allow people who are unfamiliar with computers to to
set everything up the way they would want it, you know,
with with minimum complication. Right. So, so Karen Fries became
the the project lead for this particular project. The lead
developer was a guy named Gabe Newell. Do you recognize
(06:29):
that name? Gabe Newbell. Newell was one of the co
founders of Valve. Yeah. So Gabe Newell also, uh, someone
who in his post Microsoft years, which are the last
like two and a half decades, has been, um, well,
I guess I should they the last two decades, has
been more than a little critical of his old company. Uh.
(06:50):
He's He's definitely leveled some pretty hefty criticisms against some
major Microsoft releases. But he worked on on Microsoft Bob.
Maybe that's what kind of left a certain, uh bad
taste in his mouth or something. I can see that. Uh.
And the the person at Microsoft who was kind of
overseeing the whole thing. Who was guiding it was uh. Well,
(07:11):
when she first started working on the project, her name
was Melinda French, but then kind of in the middle
of it, she became Melinda Gates. Yes, so Bill Gates's wife.
Melinda was the head of the whole marketing marketing side.
But also, you know, she was essentially kind of like
the face. She was a cheerleader and it certainly yeah,
which which led some people to suggest, perhaps snarkily or
(07:35):
maybe not even perhaps snarkily definitely that the reason why
Bob went as far as it did was because of
who was behind it, as opposed to the merits of
the operating system. But let's be fair, the idea behind
Bob was solid. It was a solid idea of let's
create something that is very accessible and intuitive and comforting,
(07:58):
and and they try to use some really hard data
to support their design decisions. They actually uh contacted a
couple of professors from Stanford to act as project consultants,
Clifford Nas and Byron Reeves, and they their their area
of specially it was figuring out, well, how how do
people communicate, how do they access information, how do they
(08:20):
process information? And their point of view is that the
more natural you can make an interaction, the more readily
someone will understand it and adapt and want to interact
with it. Exactly, So you have to create an environment
that it just it feels natural and makes sense. Now,
(08:41):
that's obviously a very a very clear motivation. I mean,
we we've seen that in products since I think the
iPad is a great example of that. It was a
design where it's very intuitive to use. You give an
iPad to a kid, that kid masters the iPad and
no time flat, without ever having to ask how something works. Yeah,
(09:04):
they've they've they've done those those great studies in in
Africa with kids who can't even read, have never been
exposed to anything like this before, and they just take
off with it. Yeah. So I mean that that's sort
of the idea here. They wanted to design something that
had that same sort of approach and appeal so that
they could help people who otherwise would be intimidated by computers.
(09:25):
So on January seven, Bill Gates took the stage at
c E S and unveiled Bob. He showed off also
a future project that was Bob related, called p D,
which was a c G I parrot that could respond
to verbal requests. And then on March thirty one, they
(09:46):
released Microsoft Bob Ah. The full retail price if you're
buying the full thing was as but it mostly sold
that around ninety, which still pretty expensive soft. Yeah yeah,
and by comparison today, due to inflation, that that would
be worth about a hundred and forty so whereas Windows
eight costs about ninety on the market. Yeah, yeah, so
(10:10):
it definitely was a little expensive. It said on the
box that did not come with a manual, but it
came with a manual, or at least it was called
Bob's Magazine, so it was trying to be packaged not
as manual, but it was a twenty nine page list
of instructions. And uh, did you hear about Microsoft Press
and the book that they published. I did not what happened?
(10:30):
They published a book called At Home with Bob At
Home with Bob, which was a companion guide, and it
was two hundred and ten pages long. Goodness, migracious, that's
a lot of guide for something that doesn't need a
guy tot all. Yeah, that's when you don't need a guide,
you go wholeheartedly down to your Microsoft I teased them.
I certainly couldn't build a graphics user interface at all.
(10:54):
So let's talk about what Bob was really like? What? What, how? How? How?
What kind of operating our user interface was it? Just
just for perspective, real quick, um, Bob was was dead
in the water by early To give you an idea
of how well this went, Microsoft pulled the plug in
nineties six. So when it went less than a full
(11:17):
year before, Microsoft said all right, this is this is
not gonna work. And we'll get into why they made
that decision. And some people might even argue that it
was kind of a like the deck was stacked against them,
that that Bob was not as horrible as it but
it was given credit for I disagree for one major reason,
(11:38):
but I'll get into that in the in a little
bit later in the podcast. So, so here we have
the idea. The whole idea is let's create a graphics
user interface. It's very relatable and easy to use and
and intuitive. How did Microsoft go about it? What was Bob?
Bob was a it was a how it was? It was?
(12:01):
You you enter Bob's house, and in Bob's house there
are visual representations of everything that you would hypothetically want
to do with your computer exactly, Like like there's a
there's a living room that you're looking into, right, so
and so Instead of a desktop where you have icons
that you click on, you're looking into a clip art
(12:21):
living room. Vector graphics. Yes, two and fifty six colors,
super fancy. Yeah. If if you don't, if you've never
seen pictures, link them, it's spectacular. Anyone who's used any
of the old Microsoft Office products that had lots and
lots of clip art in them, and you've looked through
those clip arts and you've thought, wow, that's what Bob
(12:44):
was made up of. And there was a lot of
animation involved. Every everything was kind of cute. See, yes,
everything was very cartoonish. And you have a personal assistant,
a series of personal assistants, and the one that it
came the standard one, the one that would just be
there as soon as you started up, was Rover Retriever.
The personal assistance would later come into play in versions
(13:05):
of Microsoft Office, like Microsoft Office nineties seven. We'll get
into that too. So, um, anyway, you're that your guide
when you first start off as Rover Retriever. You could
change him later and I think that'll be fun to
talk about when we get into the features list. It's exciting. Yeah,
I got I got a couple of things I want
to say about some of those those guys. But before
(13:26):
we do that, I want to I want to talk
about what it was like to first enter. So so
I'm just gonna I'm gonna paint you a picture with words.
So you you activate Microsoft Bob. You know, you've installed
it on your computer, assuming your computer could run it.
We'll get into that too, And when it first starts,
(13:46):
you are greeted by the sight of a big red door.
And in the center of that big red door is
a gold door knocker, and that door knocker says Microsoft
Bob on it. So you have to click on the knocker,
which then makes the knocker knock on the door. And
you didn't have to have a sound card with Bob,
but it was recommended because there were many noises, so
(14:09):
many noises, including one such your personal assistant would occasionally
make at you. But you would knock on the door
and Rover retriever shows up and says, uh, hey, s
you're trying to break into my house. Actually, he says,
I know you're coming in. Uh click on who you
are and a little list pops up. Now on your
first visit, there's no one. You can't select a name
(14:31):
because you haven't gotten and registered one yet, so the
only choice that's there is guest. So guest was there
so that you could let a friend log in without
having to create a full account and use your computer
to do whatever, the same way that Windows works today. Right,
so you could click guests. But if you did click guests, uh,
then you would get another message from Rover whould say,
(14:54):
are you sure you don't want to go ahead and
create a profile? Well I didn't really see that option earlier,
but sure, why not? Let's let's let's make a profile.
So Rover would then ask if you are new to
the home or if you had once been on the
list but now can no longer find your name on
the list because one of the things you can do
(15:15):
is add and remove people, or really you can remove
people from the list once you've joined it. So this
would be something like, let's say that you know you've
kicked your no good son out of the house because
he's thirty four and really he needs to go and
make his own way in the world. Now, I'm just
using this as a hypothetical. I don't have a kid,
and if I had a kid, it was thirty four.
(15:37):
I have a lot of explained to do. Anyway, So
you kicked your thirty four year old son out of
the house, and you've changed it. You've removed him from
Microsoft Bob, so if he does come back, he's not
gonna be able to use the computer. That would be
the reason for that, right, So you would have to
answer that question like are you new or were you
essentially kicked off? So let's say that you're new. You know,
(15:58):
this is your first time using Bob. You haven't alienated
yourself from your friends and family yet, So you click
on new. Then it asks you to enter in your
first name, your preferred name, your last name, your hometown,
your birthday, and your gender, which you could set to
not telling. But every yea, every single field required you
(16:20):
gotta film and and this will come back later because
these little these little cartoon guides needed to know things
about you so that they could talk to you about Stuffy. Yeah,
they did, So you filled this part out. Now you're
prompted to create a password for your account. And one
of the funny things I thought about this was that
it actually explains to you what the asterisks are as
(16:42):
you type in your password. You know how the password
field starts filling up with asterisks, because if it showed
you in plain text what the password was, that wouldn't
be very secure. Yeah, someone staying behind you could see it,
and so it actually explains that concept in But again,
Bob's design for people who are brand new to compute, right, No, no,
I I can see someone, um you know, for for example,
(17:03):
my grandmother plays a lot of solitaire, but is mostly
confused about other things on computers that could be useful. Right,
So so yeah, if you're sitting there thinking, wait, I
didn't hit the asterisk button, why is that popping up,
it would actually explain it to me. It sounds silly
simply because I've been using computers for so long it's
hard for me to even imagine that. But then again,
I was not the target market for Bob. Uh, I'm
(17:25):
not sure who was. So then after that point, after
you created it, you had to type in your password
a second time. Uh, And if you misstype the password
the second time, you would get a prompt telling you
that it did not match the first password, and you
had to try again that's going to become really important
in a little while. So next you would then, once
you get through the password creation process, you would enter
(17:46):
in your actual address and time zone, so not just
your hometown, your full address. And again it's required, so
you had to put the whole thing in there and
the time zone that you are in. Then you would
have to create at least one private room. So remember
Bob is a house. Most of those rooms in that
house are public when it starts off, which means that
anyone who joins on your computer can access those public rooms.
(18:10):
But if you wanted to create a private room where
only your stuff would be, like you know, programs that
you only want to have access to, you could do that.
Um So, if if you wanted to access a private room,
you would have to be logged in under that I
d so uh Lauren would not be able to go
into my room because of that, except we'll talk about
(18:31):
how she totally could do that pretty soon. And then
finally the last step would be that you would it
would ask you if it wanted to import other programs
besides the Bob programs that came standard with Microsoft Bob.
So I would ask if you wanted to import Dawson
Windows programs. Uh. That step is absolutely necessary. If you
(18:52):
had completely lost your mind to decide to use Bob
as your graphics user interface for everything and say I'm
not using any other interface at all, just Bob, you
would need to be able to import those other programs.
So that's the that's the process of creating your Bob account.
We're going to talk about the the the different features
(19:13):
of Bob, the software that came with it, some of
these uh, some of these assistants everything. Once that door
opens and uh, and I'll start off with the big
security flaw right after we take a short break, all
right back to Bob. So you know I mentioned that
there was a big security flaw. So Lauren, UM, let's
say that you you have got Microsoft Bob. I've got
(19:36):
a profile on there. Password, You've created a profile, You've
created a password. Whenever you need to log in, you
have to put your password in and you have one
of the one of the pieces of software and we'll
talk more about them in a minute, but one of
the pieces of software there's is Bob is Bob's Checkbook.
The idea that's a financial software so that you can
you know manage your home finances. So presumably there could
(19:58):
be some pretty pretty private information in that. And let's
say you've you've thought of that, and you've actually put
that particular program in your private, private room. So yeah,
it's not in the public room, so I'm not gonna
just happen across it. If it were in a public room,
that would be bad. Um. But you've created your password
and everything, and then I think, huh, I really want
(20:20):
to learn what Lauren's bank account number is, so I
try and log in as Lauren. When you try and
log in and you don't have the right password, after
three attempts, it says, I, you know that's not the
right password. Do you want to reset your password? And
you say yes. Instead of it then taking you to
like sending an email or linking you somehow, there's because
(20:43):
it's looking for nubs. It's saying, well, I guess I'll
just let you reset your password right now. So I
could then reset Lauren's password, so not only would I
have access to her account, I would lock her out
have access to my account anymore. Wow, that's until you
tried to enter the password three times, and then you
could reset yourself, and so it essentially just become the
two of us resetting that password over and over and
over again until you gave up and said, I do
(21:04):
not want this on my computer. Huge, huge security flaw.
Nothing is private. Well yeah, that's uh, that's at the idea.
I had not heard about that part of it, and
that is very special. And I wouldn't even need to
have an account. I mean, all I would need is
access to your computer because just going in as a guest,
I could do that. And uh yeah, so there was
(21:25):
no such thing as privacy or security with Bob. It
had this just ridiculously massive vulnerability. Uh. And you might
as well not even have a password system at that point,
because if all it takes is three failed log ins
and then you can reset the password, that's that's like
having no password at all. Uh. Same sort of problems
existed with removing people from a list. So let's say that, um,
(21:49):
let's let's have an interesting hypothetical situation here. Let's say
that for some reason, how stuff works decides to switch
completely over to Microsoft Bob and we all have a
shared environment. That sounds like the worst thing. And we'll
talk about more reasons why there's for us in a second.
But all right, so we have a shared environment. One
of the things anyone can do, whether they are logged
(22:12):
into Microsoft Bob or not, is remove someone from that list.
So I could go in and say, Josh, creepy hands Clark,
you do not get access to the computer anymore. Delete Josh,
even as a guest could say, guess what, Jonathan, neither
can you delete? Or guess what job that I'm gonna
log in as you password, password, password reset? You know,
(22:35):
it's just ridiculous and um. And part of the supposed
appeal of Bob was that you could change the decor
of any room. Right, you can make a room look
the way you wanted based upon the clippard that you're
haun available. They had windows in these rooms, so you
can change the scenery outside. Yeah, you can make it
(22:56):
like a space or field pretty unset. Yeah. Again, keep
in mind this is all clip art based stuff. But
that meant that anyone else could do the same thing,
especially especially in the public rooms. So public rooms, anyone
could go in there, move stuff around, change the layout,
delete things, put new things in, which means that if
(23:17):
Lauren lugs in and she says, oh, this doesn't make
any sense, I'm gonna rearrange everything so that makes sense
to to the way my brain works. And she lays
that out and an eyeglog and I'm like, this doesn't
make any sense, and I change it all around so
it makes sense to me. Lauren lugs back in. It's
changed completely from the last time she used it, and
it's going every time someone uses it and changes it,
it's going to be affective. Now in the example I'm using,
(23:38):
I'm suggesting that somehow we all have a networked user
interface that is as persistent across all our computers. In reality,
we're talking about one machine one one PC in a home.
But if it's a family PC and everyone logs into it,
then the kids could sit there and say like, I
don't like that chair, delete and uh. Same thing for
(23:58):
the programs. The programs will be represented by various objects
right right. Either the main ones were by objects in
the room, and anything that you added in from Windows
or daughter, etcetera would be a little file box with
an icon on the front of it. Right, So if
you wanted to to activate any of those, uh, those
main programs, you would have to click on the icon,
(24:19):
but you could actually change the size of the icon.
So if you're if you thought, you know, that checkbook
needs to be three times the size that it currently is,
you could totally do that. So it was chaos. You know,
if you had more than one user using that computer,
there was no guarantee that your experience was going to
be remotely similar from one instance to the next, So
(24:40):
that was a big issue as well. Um, that's also
less intuitive. I mean, if you're if you're designing this
for someone who really doesn't know what they're doing, I
can't imagine that that would be helpful. Yeah, and uh
and once you had that that profile created in your
inside the Home of Microsoft Bob, you had the opportunity
to take the home tour. The home tour did not
(25:01):
leave the room you were in, so whatever room you
were in, you would stay in there for the home
tour and it would get go through about sixteen prompts
of information. Uh. So we had someone on Facebook asked
us a question specifically saying, is this where Clippy came from? Yes?
And no. The assistance that you could get in Bob
(25:23):
were acting very much in the same way that Clippy
on Microsoft Office ninety seven and word would perform. You know,
that like, I see you're trying to write a resume,
would you like some help? Same sort of thing was
in Bob. In fact, that was one of the few
things to carry over into other Microsoft products. Yeah. Also,
the dog from the Windows XP search function was basically
(25:44):
retriever U there. When we talk about some of the
other personal assistants, you'll recognize that at least one of
them did make it into Microsoft Office. A Clippy was
not in Bob, but he Clippy, in his own little way,
was hated just as much as Bob was. Um. So yeah,
you could uh and and you would have to go
from room to room inside Bob in order to access
(26:05):
all the different programs, and that was not always the
most intuitive thing to do, which was unfortunate considering that
the whole purpose of Bob was to make using computers
even easier. Um and so yeah, you could just sit
there and change out clip art to your heart's content.
So I guess we can talk a little bit about
about the actual requirements the software and and sort of
(26:26):
a little bit more about the navigation that once you're
in Bob. Um. I'm still reeling over the fact that
essentially everyone had administrative rights on Bob no matter what,
whether they were logged in or not. That's kind of crazy,
all right, Okay, So so the so the programs that
came native to Bob included a household Manager UM, which
(26:47):
was kind of kind of kind of life tips and
home organizational kind of things like if you needed it
to do list or something like that. I think that
that was part of that function. Yeah, you could also
do that out of the calendar as well. Um. It
did have a note on it that the textual information
may not be accurate or complete, and it's not intended
to replace consultation with a professional, which really entertains me
(27:08):
because I'm like, yeah, we're just we just wrote some stuff. Anyway,
there was the Bob letter Writer, Yes, we should help
you write letter. I see you're trying to write a letter,
And that was very much like Clippy, to the point
where you could tell Bob what sort of letter you
were writing and to what sort of person you were writing,
and it would fill out. It would auto fill out
an entire letters very awful, might not at all related
(27:32):
to what you want to say. Um. I almost only
want to communicate in those now, just to see how
how far I could get using only Bob created letters. Uh,
and and just see if I could communicate my point
across through auto film messages. So Lauren, you've got something
to look forward to in the upcoming week. Thank you,
(27:53):
Thank you Microsoft for making this possible. Um No, I'm sorry, Microsoft,
Please don't please don't kill me. Um. There's a financial
guide Bob Checkbook, which was also compatible with Microsoft's money software. Right.
Uh that calendar that Jonathan mentioned, an address book. You
could sign up for a Bob email account. I totally
(28:14):
wish I had one of those. This was this was
It was an extra charge at the time and went
only through a proprietary email client. You couldn't just sign
up any email client that you want to take through
the system. Still. And then Geo Safari the game. It
was a little game with an education. There were a
couple of There are a couple of of little assistance
(28:35):
that would pop up for specific programs, and one of
them was a little elephant guy who would pop up
in Geo Safari. So while you're playing the game, this
little elephant dude shows up and asks you questions about
various areas or even not just geography, but also animals.
So I actually watched a video of this demonstrated where
a person was playing it, and it gave you pairs
(28:57):
of animals and explained their relationship to each other. So
shark and fish would be predator and prey, uh. And
then a what was the one like a shark and
a lamprey would be a partner animal partnership, so a
symbiotic relationship. And then like a deer and a tick,
which would be a parasite parasitic relationship. And then what
(29:18):
it would do is it would show you two animals
and you had to figure out which of those three
categories those two animals would would fall into that that
pair would fall into. So that was an example of
that GeoSafari game. But most of the game, from what
I understand, was really more of geography than uh than biology,
right anyway, So that was one of those little assistances
that would pop up for a specific instance. But there
(29:39):
were other assistants as well, right, Yeah, we had I've
got a whole list here. We've got blithe the firefly, hopper,
the bunny, or be the globe ruby. Uh. It was
it was basically an angry bird before before angry birds
were a thing. Um Shelly the turtle, speaker, the the
(30:00):
a speaker. It was a little a little icon of
a of a like a noise making computer speak. Um,
Chaos the cat, Java the dinosaur. I think, Scus the rat.
Scuse the mouse. It was a mouse, not a rat. Hey, no,
just goes a link to a blind dot digger the worm.
Um and William Shakespeare are the ones you forgot. The
(30:23):
most important one of the two important ones. There's the dot.
The dot. It was a giant red dot, okay, with
the big smiley face. But the most important one was
Bode Laire, the French gargoyle. How could you leave out
bode Laire, the French gargoyle? I had I had heard
tell of a gargoyle, but I didn't have its name,
(30:43):
and I didn't I didn't want to. His name was
Bode Laire. Well, he's a gargoyle who was French. Yeah.
And each of these, each of these assistants had its
own kind of personality in a way, in the sense
that it would some of them would be a little
more active than others, so Um would would be faster
to jump in and offer suggestions than others. Apparently, Scuzzie
(31:05):
the mouse was really apathetic just just didn't care. Botelaire
was supposedly very quiet unless you specifically clicked on bodel
Aire to to get some help. Some of them were
a little more proactive, right, And they all had different
different words that they would use. They had a different vocabulary,
and for example, one of the words that Rover really
liked using was scrumptious, as as in, I'm just one
(31:28):
of a scrumptious gang of personal guides here to help
you find your way in the home dog. Uh blythe
would say OI a lot, I'm not joking back off
like that kind of thing. Yeah, because I read up
on these. Um yeah, So so anyway, they if you,
(31:49):
if this sounds to you like this would be even
more obnoxious than Clippy, you're pretty much on the right track.
That does the feedback in fact that many people well
I mean obviously Clippy didn't exist yet as a as
a point of ref yeah, uh and uh, you know,
you have that personal assistant going with you wherever, so
you could actually there was one choice that was invisible,
(32:11):
and invisible was essentially no personal assistant. You could still
get help if you really needed it, but you didn't
have that that little animated character who was almost always
in the lower right hand corner of your screen. Uh.
And and these were characters that also like if if
you were idle for an extended time, characters like like
Rover or Chaos would go to sleep. And yeah, and
(32:34):
occasionally they would interact with other stuff in the room
to kind of be amusing. But I think I would
have considered it distracting personally, but absolutely uh and then uh, yeah,
it also had a I thought it was nice that
that Bob came with some productivity software like letter Writer,
in the sense that you didn't already have to go
out and buy other software suites. You could do some
basic computing stuff in Bob. It's uh, it's unfortunate that
(32:58):
most of the navigation looked pretty complex. Actually it would.
It would pull up these these dialogue windows with lots
of different choices. Yeah, I mean, I mean like RPG
level choice. I mean like like seven different choices on
all these menus. Right, so you see, you know, basic
menu design, you want to try and keep it as
simple as possible. But some of these menus had seven
or more choices on them, and and now all of
(33:20):
them were intuitive, like you couldn't really be like one
of them might be change something like, well that's not
specific at all, what does that mean? And if you
clicked on it would allow you to do things like
change the the view of the room, so whatever is
in the wind, whatever's appearing in the window, or change
which programs are there or or or move to a
different room. Um, you could add doorways, you could add rooms.
(33:44):
Uh and uh you might think this, uh, this, this
program probably didn't meet with too much success or acclaim
and you'd you'd be right, you'd be correct entirely. It.
According to pc Data, a retail research firm, only around
fifty eight thousand copies of Bob were ever sold. Um.
(34:05):
By contrast, uh moved like two point seven five million
copies in retail the first month. Yeah, so fifty eight
thousand for the almost the year that it existed. And
that's it. Um. Also, Microsoft kind of shot itself in
the foot. They distributed copies review copies to journalists back
(34:25):
in December, right with with an embargo on reviews until
only until after CES, not until the product launched, right
and so at c S. Bill Gates gets up talks
about it, but at that point the embargo lifts which
means that the journalists are allowed to write their thoughts
on Microsoft Bob. And they did and some of them
(34:46):
were how they did, Yeah, there's yeah one one. One
guy said that uh much much of the behavior of
these of these characters that are running around helping you
out will be unappealing to people. Seriously bent I'm getting
a lot of their PCs or two adults of any
kind for that matter, essentially saying that anyone who's not
a kid is going to hate this, right and that
(35:08):
that is the thing, you know, that's I feel like,
even if if I were completely new to computers had
never used your scene one, if I had a cartoon
talking to me about what I wanted to do, I've
it doesn't. It feels like it's a toy. It feels
like it's it feels like it's a toy. It feels
like it's talking down to you. Um and I mean
to be fair. When Microsoft was showing off the assistance
way back with publisher there were the response was very positive.
(35:31):
People were saying, this is fantastic because these these programs
are getting so complicated that I just don't know how
to do some of the things that you know, I
occasionally need to do, but I don't do so frequently
that I've memorized the path to do this, and I
want this for everything. And Microsoft heard those those cries
and ran with it to the point where people realize
they didn't really want it for everything. They wanted it
(35:54):
for stuff that was beyond an easy couple of cliques, right,
And and that's that is where a lot of the
later Wizards came out of And you know, I mean,
we still have that on computers and it can still
be useful. Um. And I think that they were. Some
of their test audiences supposedly reacted very well to it. Um.
(36:15):
According to an article in PC World, um Fries had
Karen fries had remembered one man's response early on to
to a to a little duck helper quote. This guy
was very emotional about it. He grabbed my arm. He said,
save all the money on the manuals and just give
me this duck to always be there and tell me
what to do. Yeah. Which again they ran with that,
(36:38):
and unfortunately I think they took it to too far
of an extreme. Also, Bob was a bit of a
resource hog. Uh. Keep in mind, in order to run it,
you were Uh, the suggested minimum system requirements were to
have a forty six CPU. Well I remember those days.
I actually had a two eighty six way back in
the day. If you had a three day six, yeah,
(37:00):
oh super fast. You had to have thirty megabytes of
free disk space. Again, that doesn't sound like much, but
it was no. I mean at the time a thirty
tea card drive was large and uh, and eight megabytes
of memory, which was about twice as much as what
most of the computers had. So for the time, you
had to have a very powerful machine to be able
(37:21):
to just run this and so and so. Yeah, and
so you're talking someone who's who's never used computers before
but has a better one than most other people. Yeah,
they would have to go and spend a good amount
of money. Uh. They did come standard on one of
the Gateway computers. Um, the Bob was the standard user
in their face for that machine. It's also fortunate for
(37:42):
that Gateway it had a different layout to it looked
more like a barn than a house. Um. Beyond that,
it was the same stuff. I just I just face
palmed at that very idea excellent. I don't really have
anything more to say about about that part of it,
but also they there's some other there's another legacy that
Bob left us. Although it's interesting it was not actually
(38:04):
used in Bob, but it was created for Bob and
it has lived on in infamy ever since. It's something
that is perhaps even more hated than Bob itself, maybe
only because it's been persistent. Right we are, we are
talking about the font comics stands, comic sands. That was
a font that was designed specifically for Bob, and it
wasn't used in Bob, but that was then incorporated in
(38:26):
future Microsoft releases and and this this font has received
a lot of hate, a lot of hate. Well it
was it was created originally because Microsoft designer Vincent Connair
saw a beta of Bob and thought that time's new
rooman was that was the font being used in it
at the time. And he was like, there's a disconnect
between this fun, bubbly image that we're presenting and very
(38:50):
terse formal font, and so let's make something that looks
like it came straight out of a comic book and
then reaping the rewards and echo aids for generations to come.
You know what, I don't hate comic sands I'll come
out and say it. I don't particularly love it, but
I don't hate it. I know people, though, who have
a violent reaction to I hate it. In business emails, yes,
(39:14):
if I get a business email from someone, it's in
comic sense. It's hard to take that email seriously. You know,
if it starts off with hey, bozo, I'll go ahead
and read it, though, because then I'm like, all right,
now you're on Now you're speaking my language. I got you.
Now we're on the same page. There's some sort of weird, ironic,
sarcastic email, and now I need to know what it says.
I don't know. I don't think. I don't think I
(39:34):
want to become a kind of hipster who uses comic
fans on on purpose in an ironic way. Yeah, you
don't want your emails to have a giant mustache, now
I do not. That's fair, alright, So, um, do you
have anything else you want to say about Bob before
we wrap it up? I think I think that is
the complete breadth and depth that it's. It's it's funny
(39:55):
that we were even able to do an episode on this.
When I first thought about I was thinking, am I
really gonna be able to talk about a product that
only was out on the market for less than a year.
It turns out, yes we were because there was a
lot too. There were a lot of good ideas that
went into the development of Bob. They just didn't get
implemented in a way that was really useful. Actually, I
(40:16):
do have one more story. I'm sorry completely loued a
second ago about about the legacy of Bob. According to
Raymond Chen for tech Net magazine, I know this story
when when when Windows XP came out, it came out
on CD and there were maybe about thirty megabytes of
capacity left over on the CD, so thirty megabytes of
free space, free space, sure, and they wanted to fill
(40:37):
it up with some encrypted data that would be checked
by the set up program as part of the installation
and verification process. Um, just just to you know, make
make it a little bit more difficult for pirates to
download it, right, But by adding thirty megabytes to the
to the size of the file, you would increase the
download time significantly. Because remember this is back in this
(40:59):
is not broadband time. We're talking about using a dial
up modem. So if you're using a dial up modem
to try and pirate software. Thirty megabytes might be the
difference between I'll go and do it or no, I'm
not gonna do it. Um but so, but so instead
of putting just random gobbledygook into that extra thirty megs,
he um whoever was doing it, I'm not sure if
(41:19):
it was. If it could have it could have been
a brave woman in our in our technical industry, um
uh used used the entirety of Bob. Yeah, I've heard
and encrypted it and scrambled it with a keyboard mash
encryption key. I've heard that. I've heard that story. I've
also heard that it might be apocryphal, So do take
that with a grain of salt. But it is a
fun story to say that, Hey, I need to fill
(41:41):
up this thirty megabytes of space, how big Bob? Thirty
megabytes done? We got it, you need it, you need
to fill it up with gibberish. I've got Bob. We've
got so much. That just hurts even more than yeah yeah, sweetheart.
Well that that kind of wraps up our discussion on Bob.
Before we sign off, I do want to say something.
We've how stuff works. We've recently launched some YouTube channels
(42:03):
of the various shows that are here at How Stuff Works.
We've got some podcasts that are now doing video shows
and they're amazing. They're fantastic. We don't really we don't
have a tech stuff one yet yet guys making a
face of terror, but we have and there are the
ones that have come out already. We're looking at them
and we're thinking, Wow, we've got a lot to live
up to. So one I want to recommend to you
(42:24):
guys is the Stuff to Blow your Mind channel and
uh and to check this out, you need to go
to www dot YouTube dot com slash Mind Stuff Show
and you're gonna be able to see Robert and Julie
of of Stuff to Blow your Mind doing some amazing videos.
They're really creative and they're really a lot of fun.
And it got one about slime that I'm particularly partial to. Yeah, Yeah,
(42:45):
we've been pretty knee deep in the slime thing recently
and we've seen them, Like I love seeing them shoot
because we can actually see them shooting throughout the day
as we go through the various little bits at the
office here there, which is kind of fun. And whenever
you see like the beakers and test tubes that you're
thinking something good is happening. So I highly recommend you
guys go and check that out. And if you have
(43:07):
any suggestions for us to cover a certain topic here
on tech Stuff, let us know. Write us an email
or address as tech stuff at discovery dot com, or
drop us a line on Twitter or Facebook. You can
find us there with the handle text stuff H s
W and Lauren and I will talk to you again.
Really shon for more on this and thousands of other topics.
(43:34):
Does it has stuff works dot com
Get in touch with technology with tex Stuff from how
stuff dot com Either everyone, and welcome to tech Stuff.
I'm Jonathan Strickland and I'm Lauren Obama. Today we're going
to talk about something that a listeners sent in. This
is JP from New Jersey who wrote, Hey, Jonathan and Lauren,
(00:25):
I wanted to see if you guys would consider doing
a podcast about history success, parentheses, Sara kas and closed
their entheses, and eventual downfall of Microsoft. Bob keep up
the great shows. Thanks JP. We're gonna tackle Bob and
we're gonna wrestle him to the ground and probably give
him noogies. But then so did the rest of the world. Yeah,
(00:45):
if you don't know what Bob is, don't feel badly
about it. It was one of the biggest flops in
Microsoft history, I think, one of the biggest flops and
kind of history period. Time did this list of the
fifty worst inventions ever Time Magazine. Time Magazine, Yeah, back
in back, and Bob was on there. I mean, along
with like tanning beds and hydrogen blimps. Yeah, hydrogen blimps
(01:10):
not such a great thing Microsoft. Bob possibly worse. It's
killed killed fewer people killed fewer people, but people dreams
died that day when Microsoft Bob came out that this
was an interface for Windows three point one, and then
later came out, yeah it was. It was also for
Windows in t So here's the thing, here's the thing.
(01:30):
We're talking about era where the personal computer is starting
to get some serious traction but still is not in
most homes. In fact, Microsoft, when they were talking about
designing Bob and the launch of Bob, they were predicting
that by I think it was seven that PCs would
be in forty six percent of households, and and and
this was that this was a forty six percent in
(01:51):
the incredible future. The idea of being is a really
big number that Microsoft is crazy to think that that
many people would have computers. Well, the problem that Microsoft
had identified as something that they needed to solve with
brute force is that that someone who is unfamiliar with
computers might find the operation of such a device to
(02:13):
be intimidating and difficult, and the learning curve might be
too too steep for your average person who was not
already familiar with computers. And certainly before Windows three point
one came out, when it was just doss on say
just doss operation. You know, I'm simply saying that it
was perhaps not the most friendly thing to greet a
(02:34):
person just just lines of code on a screen. I
didn't need a friend, I needed an operating system. That's
what Does gave me. And that's kind of that is
kind of what what McIntosh was doing at the time.
And and and Apple was was kind of kicking a
lot of button that arena because they were giving people
something more friendly, more user friendly, and a little bit
more intuitive, right and keep in minding of course, Apple
(02:55):
had a big jump on other computers because the Apple
to a very popular personal computer among mostly hobbyists and
people who were interested in computers. Because again that was
that was in the line command days, we had the
type stuff in is when Apple introduced the Macintosh and
the graphics user interface. Apple of course was not the
the company to invent the graphic excuser interface, but they
(03:18):
were the first ones to really successfully implement it in
a personal computer platform, and people liked it. It was
one of those things where things just made more sense.
It was it was it was a little more intuitive
than having to type and memorize all these different commands
that you would type into just get your computer to
do stuff. Well, Microsoft wanted to kind of um create
(03:40):
its own graphic unit user interface, and that was the
genesis of the Windows program. But even then they thought,
there's gotta be a way of making this simpler for
the average person. Now, to really look at the development
of Bob, you have to go back a few years
before Bob was a thing. And so back in nine
Microsoft launched a program called Microsoft Publisher. It's a desktop
(04:02):
publishing program and it was the first program from Microsoft
that included Wizards. Now, wizards are not you know, it's
not Harry Potter coming out and waving a wan saying
regard um leviosa or a laho mora or uh avauta cadavera.
It's instead a little a little help pop up. Yeah,
(04:22):
that's supposed to guide you through a complicated process step
by step. So this was a big help for someone
who maybe was not familiar with this particular process or
very rarely used it. And uh and could just follow
along on the directions as opposed to having to thumb
through a four page manual, right and and and Microsoft
(04:42):
Publisher was was pretty popular. It was designed by Karen
Fries and Barry Lynnette, Yeah, and Karen Fryes is going
to become important in a little bit and uh. And
right when when they were you know, they had finished
with publisher, it was out in the world, it was
doing great, and they were like, what else can we do?
What is our next project? We want to keep helping newbs.
I'm not sure if Neubs was a yeah, no, but
that's that's that's exactly you know, we're going to translate
(05:03):
it for the kids of today. We're really the kids
of about six seven years ago. But anyway, yes, uh,
they wanted to continue to develop software that would help
people who otherwise would be unfamiliar and maybe intimidated by software.
So that's when they started to look into the possibility
of developing a full graphics user interface designed with these
(05:27):
nudes in mind. Originally they were calling it Data Wizard,
and then that eventually had the code name Utopia, but
by the time it was finally going to launch, it
had of course changed to Microsoft Bob is designed as
an alternative interface, as as Lauren said earlier, for Windows
three point one and even Windows and Team It's supported
(05:48):
programs designed for Bob, so it supported its own programs
designed for that operating system or rather that user interface. Uh.
It also supported Windows programs and supported DOS programs. So
the idea was that this would be able to support
anything that a person would want to run on a PC.
(06:09):
So but but you know, through through this filter that
would allow people who are unfamiliar with computers to to
set everything up the way they would want it, you know,
with with minimum complication. Right. So, so Karen Fries became
the the project lead for this particular project. The lead
developer was a guy named Gabe Newell. Do you recognize
(06:29):
that name? Gabe Newbell. Newell was one of the co
founders of Valve. Yeah. So Gabe Newell also, uh, someone
who in his post Microsoft years, which are the last
like two and a half decades, has been, um, well,
I guess I should they the last two decades, has
been more than a little critical of his old company. Uh.
(06:50):
He's He's definitely leveled some pretty hefty criticisms against some
major Microsoft releases. But he worked on on Microsoft Bob.
Maybe that's what kind of left a certain, uh bad
taste in his mouth or something. I can see that. Uh.
And the the person at Microsoft who was kind of
overseeing the whole thing. Who was guiding it was uh. Well,
(07:11):
when she first started working on the project, her name
was Melinda French, but then kind of in the middle
of it, she became Melinda Gates. Yes, so Bill Gates's wife.
Melinda was the head of the whole marketing marketing side.
But also, you know, she was essentially kind of like
the face. She was a cheerleader and it certainly yeah,
which which led some people to suggest, perhaps snarkily or
(07:35):
maybe not even perhaps snarkily definitely that the reason why
Bob went as far as it did was because of
who was behind it, as opposed to the merits of
the operating system. But let's be fair, the idea behind
Bob was solid. It was a solid idea of let's
create something that is very accessible and intuitive and comforting,
(07:58):
and and they try to use some really hard data
to support their design decisions. They actually uh contacted a
couple of professors from Stanford to act as project consultants,
Clifford Nas and Byron Reeves, and they their their area
of specially it was figuring out, well, how how do
people communicate, how do they access information, how do they
(08:20):
process information? And their point of view is that the
more natural you can make an interaction, the more readily
someone will understand it and adapt and want to interact
with it. Exactly, So you have to create an environment
that it just it feels natural and makes sense. Now,
(08:41):
that's obviously a very a very clear motivation. I mean,
we we've seen that in products since I think the
iPad is a great example of that. It was a
design where it's very intuitive to use. You give an
iPad to a kid, that kid masters the iPad and
no time flat, without ever having to ask how something works. Yeah,
(09:04):
they've they've they've done those those great studies in in
Africa with kids who can't even read, have never been
exposed to anything like this before, and they just take
off with it. Yeah. So I mean that that's sort
of the idea here. They wanted to design something that
had that same sort of approach and appeal so that
they could help people who otherwise would be intimidated by computers.
(09:25):
So on January seven, Bill Gates took the stage at
c E S and unveiled Bob. He showed off also
a future project that was Bob related, called p D,
which was a c G I parrot that could respond
to verbal requests. And then on March thirty one, they
(09:46):
released Microsoft Bob Ah. The full retail price if you're
buying the full thing was as but it mostly sold
that around ninety, which still pretty expensive soft. Yeah yeah,
and by comparison today, due to inflation, that that would
be worth about a hundred and forty so whereas Windows
eight costs about ninety on the market. Yeah, yeah, so
(10:10):
it definitely was a little expensive. It said on the
box that did not come with a manual, but it
came with a manual, or at least it was called
Bob's Magazine, so it was trying to be packaged not
as manual, but it was a twenty nine page list
of instructions. And uh, did you hear about Microsoft Press
and the book that they published. I did not what happened?
(10:30):
They published a book called At Home with Bob At
Home with Bob, which was a companion guide, and it
was two hundred and ten pages long. Goodness, migracious, that's
a lot of guide for something that doesn't need a
guy tot all. Yeah, that's when you don't need a guide,
you go wholeheartedly down to your Microsoft I teased them.
I certainly couldn't build a graphics user interface at all.
(10:54):
So let's talk about what Bob was really like? What? What, how? How? How?
What kind of operating our user interface was it? Just
just for perspective, real quick, um, Bob was was dead
in the water by early To give you an idea
of how well this went, Microsoft pulled the plug in
nineties six. So when it went less than a full
(11:17):
year before, Microsoft said all right, this is this is
not gonna work. And we'll get into why they made
that decision. And some people might even argue that it
was kind of a like the deck was stacked against them,
that that Bob was not as horrible as it but
it was given credit for I disagree for one major reason,
(11:38):
but I'll get into that in the in a little
bit later in the podcast. So, so here we have
the idea. The whole idea is let's create a graphics
user interface. It's very relatable and easy to use and
and intuitive. How did Microsoft go about it? What was Bob?
Bob was a it was a how it was? It was?
(12:01):
You you enter Bob's house, and in Bob's house there
are visual representations of everything that you would hypothetically want
to do with your computer exactly, Like like there's a
there's a living room that you're looking into, right, so
and so Instead of a desktop where you have icons
that you click on, you're looking into a clip art
(12:21):
living room. Vector graphics. Yes, two and fifty six colors,
super fancy. Yeah. If if you don't, if you've never
seen pictures, link them, it's spectacular. Anyone who's used any
of the old Microsoft Office products that had lots and
lots of clip art in them, and you've looked through
those clip arts and you've thought, wow, that's what Bob
(12:44):
was made up of. And there was a lot of
animation involved. Every everything was kind of cute. See, yes,
everything was very cartoonish. And you have a personal assistant,
a series of personal assistants, and the one that it
came the standard one, the one that would just be
there as soon as you started up, was Rover Retriever.
The personal assistance would later come into play in versions
(13:05):
of Microsoft Office, like Microsoft Office nineties seven. We'll get
into that too. So, um, anyway, you're that your guide
when you first start off as Rover Retriever. You could
change him later and I think that'll be fun to
talk about when we get into the features list. It's exciting. Yeah,
I got I got a couple of things I want
to say about some of those those guys. But before
(13:26):
we do that, I want to I want to talk
about what it was like to first enter. So so
I'm just gonna I'm gonna paint you a picture with words.
So you you activate Microsoft Bob. You know, you've installed
it on your computer, assuming your computer could run it.
We'll get into that too, And when it first starts,
(13:46):
you are greeted by the sight of a big red door.
And in the center of that big red door is
a gold door knocker, and that door knocker says Microsoft
Bob on it. So you have to click on the knocker,
which then makes the knocker knock on the door. And
you didn't have to have a sound card with Bob,
but it was recommended because there were many noises, so
(14:09):
many noises, including one such your personal assistant would occasionally
make at you. But you would knock on the door
and Rover retriever shows up and says, uh, hey, s
you're trying to break into my house. Actually, he says,
I know you're coming in. Uh click on who you
are and a little list pops up. Now on your
first visit, there's no one. You can't select a name
(14:31):
because you haven't gotten and registered one yet, so the
only choice that's there is guest. So guest was there
so that you could let a friend log in without
having to create a full account and use your computer
to do whatever, the same way that Windows works today. Right,
so you could click guests. But if you did click guests, uh,
then you would get another message from Rover whould say,
(14:54):
are you sure you don't want to go ahead and
create a profile? Well I didn't really see that option earlier,
but sure, why not? Let's let's let's make a profile.
So Rover would then ask if you are new to
the home or if you had once been on the
list but now can no longer find your name on
the list because one of the things you can do
(15:15):
is add and remove people, or really you can remove
people from the list once you've joined it. So this
would be something like, let's say that you know you've
kicked your no good son out of the house because
he's thirty four and really he needs to go and
make his own way in the world. Now, I'm just
using this as a hypothetical. I don't have a kid,
and if I had a kid, it was thirty four.
(15:37):
I have a lot of explained to do. Anyway, So
you kicked your thirty four year old son out of
the house, and you've changed it. You've removed him from
Microsoft Bob, so if he does come back, he's not
gonna be able to use the computer. That would be
the reason for that, right, So you would have to
answer that question like are you new or were you
essentially kicked off? So let's say that you're new. You know,
(15:58):
this is your first time using Bob. You haven't alienated
yourself from your friends and family yet, So you click
on new. Then it asks you to enter in your
first name, your preferred name, your last name, your hometown,
your birthday, and your gender, which you could set to
not telling. But every yea, every single field required you
(16:20):
gotta film and and this will come back later because
these little these little cartoon guides needed to know things
about you so that they could talk to you about Stuffy. Yeah,
they did, So you filled this part out. Now you're
prompted to create a password for your account. And one
of the funny things I thought about this was that
it actually explains to you what the asterisks are as
(16:42):
you type in your password. You know how the password
field starts filling up with asterisks, because if it showed
you in plain text what the password was, that wouldn't
be very secure. Yeah, someone staying behind you could see it,
and so it actually explains that concept in But again,
Bob's design for people who are brand new to compute, right, No, no,
I I can see someone, um you know, for for example,
(17:03):
my grandmother plays a lot of solitaire, but is mostly
confused about other things on computers that could be useful. Right,
So so yeah, if you're sitting there thinking, wait, I
didn't hit the asterisk button, why is that popping up,
it would actually explain it to me. It sounds silly
simply because I've been using computers for so long it's
hard for me to even imagine that. But then again,
I was not the target market for Bob. Uh, I'm
(17:25):
not sure who was. So then after that point, after
you created it, you had to type in your password
a second time. Uh, And if you misstype the password
the second time, you would get a prompt telling you
that it did not match the first password, and you
had to try again that's going to become really important
in a little while. So next you would then, once
you get through the password creation process, you would enter
(17:46):
in your actual address and time zone, so not just
your hometown, your full address. And again it's required, so
you had to put the whole thing in there and
the time zone that you are in. Then you would
have to create at least one private room. So remember
Bob is a house. Most of those rooms in that
house are public when it starts off, which means that
anyone who joins on your computer can access those public rooms.
(18:10):
But if you wanted to create a private room where
only your stuff would be, like you know, programs that
you only want to have access to, you could do that.
Um So, if if you wanted to access a private room,
you would have to be logged in under that I
d so uh Lauren would not be able to go
into my room because of that, except we'll talk about
(18:31):
how she totally could do that pretty soon. And then
finally the last step would be that you would it
would ask you if it wanted to import other programs
besides the Bob programs that came standard with Microsoft Bob.
So I would ask if you wanted to import Dawson
Windows programs. Uh. That step is absolutely necessary. If you
(18:52):
had completely lost your mind to decide to use Bob
as your graphics user interface for everything and say I'm
not using any other interface at all, just Bob, you
would need to be able to import those other programs.
So that's the that's the process of creating your Bob account.
We're going to talk about the the the different features
(19:13):
of Bob, the software that came with it, some of
these uh, some of these assistants everything. Once that door
opens and uh, and I'll start off with the big
security flaw right after we take a short break, all
right back to Bob. So you know I mentioned that
there was a big security flaw. So Lauren, UM, let's
say that you you have got Microsoft Bob. I've got
(19:36):
a profile on there. Password, You've created a profile, You've
created a password. Whenever you need to log in, you
have to put your password in and you have one
of the one of the pieces of software and we'll
talk more about them in a minute, but one of
the pieces of software there's is Bob is Bob's Checkbook.
The idea that's a financial software so that you can
you know manage your home finances. So presumably there could
(19:58):
be some pretty pretty private information in that. And let's
say you've you've thought of that, and you've actually put
that particular program in your private, private room. So yeah,
it's not in the public room, so I'm not gonna
just happen across it. If it were in a public room,
that would be bad. Um. But you've created your password
and everything, and then I think, huh, I really want
(20:20):
to learn what Lauren's bank account number is, so I
try and log in as Lauren. When you try and
log in and you don't have the right password, after
three attempts, it says, I, you know that's not the
right password. Do you want to reset your password? And
you say yes. Instead of it then taking you to
like sending an email or linking you somehow, there's because
(20:43):
it's looking for nubs. It's saying, well, I guess I'll
just let you reset your password right now. So I
could then reset Lauren's password, so not only would I
have access to her account, I would lock her out
have access to my account anymore. Wow, that's until you
tried to enter the password three times, and then you
could reset yourself, and so it essentially just become the
two of us resetting that password over and over and
over again until you gave up and said, I do
(21:04):
not want this on my computer. Huge, huge security flaw.
Nothing is private. Well yeah, that's uh, that's at the idea.
I had not heard about that part of it, and
that is very special. And I wouldn't even need to
have an account. I mean, all I would need is
access to your computer because just going in as a guest,
I could do that. And uh yeah, so there was
(21:25):
no such thing as privacy or security with Bob. It
had this just ridiculously massive vulnerability. Uh. And you might
as well not even have a password system at that point,
because if all it takes is three failed log ins
and then you can reset the password, that's that's like
having no password at all. Uh. Same sort of problems
existed with removing people from a list. So let's say that, um,
(21:49):
let's let's have an interesting hypothetical situation here. Let's say
that for some reason, how stuff works decides to switch
completely over to Microsoft Bob and we all have a
shared environment. That sounds like the worst thing. And we'll
talk about more reasons why there's for us in a second.
But all right, so we have a shared environment. One
of the things anyone can do, whether they are logged
(22:12):
into Microsoft Bob or not, is remove someone from that list.
So I could go in and say, Josh, creepy hands Clark,
you do not get access to the computer anymore. Delete Josh,
even as a guest could say, guess what, Jonathan, neither
can you delete? Or guess what job that I'm gonna
log in as you password, password, password reset? You know,
(22:35):
it's just ridiculous and um. And part of the supposed
appeal of Bob was that you could change the decor
of any room. Right, you can make a room look
the way you wanted based upon the clippard that you're
haun available. They had windows in these rooms, so you
can change the scenery outside. Yeah, you can make it
(22:56):
like a space or field pretty unset. Yeah. Again, keep
in mind this is all clip art based stuff. But
that meant that anyone else could do the same thing,
especially especially in the public rooms. So public rooms, anyone
could go in there, move stuff around, change the layout,
delete things, put new things in, which means that if
(23:17):
Lauren lugs in and she says, oh, this doesn't make
any sense, I'm gonna rearrange everything so that makes sense
to to the way my brain works. And she lays
that out and an eyeglog and I'm like, this doesn't
make any sense, and I change it all around so
it makes sense to me. Lauren lugs back in. It's
changed completely from the last time she used it, and
it's going every time someone uses it and changes it,
it's going to be affective. Now in the example I'm using,
(23:38):
I'm suggesting that somehow we all have a networked user
interface that is as persistent across all our computers. In reality,
we're talking about one machine one one PC in a home.
But if it's a family PC and everyone logs into it,
then the kids could sit there and say like, I
don't like that chair, delete and uh. Same thing for
(23:58):
the programs. The programs will be represented by various objects
right right. Either the main ones were by objects in
the room, and anything that you added in from Windows
or daughter, etcetera would be a little file box with
an icon on the front of it. Right, So if
you wanted to to activate any of those, uh, those
main programs, you would have to click on the icon,
(24:19):
but you could actually change the size of the icon.
So if you're if you thought, you know, that checkbook
needs to be three times the size that it currently is,
you could totally do that. So it was chaos. You know,
if you had more than one user using that computer,
there was no guarantee that your experience was going to
be remotely similar from one instance to the next, So
(24:40):
that was a big issue as well. Um, that's also
less intuitive. I mean, if you're if you're designing this
for someone who really doesn't know what they're doing, I
can't imagine that that would be helpful. Yeah, and uh
and once you had that that profile created in your
inside the Home of Microsoft Bob, you had the opportunity
to take the home tour. The home tour did not
(25:01):
leave the room you were in, so whatever room you
were in, you would stay in there for the home
tour and it would get go through about sixteen prompts
of information. Uh. So we had someone on Facebook asked
us a question specifically saying, is this where Clippy came from? Yes?
And no. The assistance that you could get in Bob
(25:23):
were acting very much in the same way that Clippy
on Microsoft Office ninety seven and word would perform. You know,
that like, I see you're trying to write a resume,
would you like some help? Same sort of thing was
in Bob. In fact, that was one of the few
things to carry over into other Microsoft products. Yeah. Also,
the dog from the Windows XP search function was basically
(25:44):
retriever U there. When we talk about some of the
other personal assistants, you'll recognize that at least one of
them did make it into Microsoft Office. A Clippy was
not in Bob, but he Clippy, in his own little way,
was hated just as much as Bob was. Um. So yeah,
you could uh and and you would have to go
from room to room inside Bob in order to access
(26:05):
all the different programs, and that was not always the
most intuitive thing to do, which was unfortunate considering that
the whole purpose of Bob was to make using computers
even easier. Um and so yeah, you could just sit
there and change out clip art to your heart's content.
So I guess we can talk a little bit about
about the actual requirements the software and and sort of
(26:26):
a little bit more about the navigation that once you're
in Bob. Um. I'm still reeling over the fact that
essentially everyone had administrative rights on Bob no matter what,
whether they were logged in or not. That's kind of crazy,
all right, Okay, So so the so the programs that
came native to Bob included a household Manager UM, which
(26:47):
was kind of kind of kind of life tips and
home organizational kind of things like if you needed it
to do list or something like that. I think that
that was part of that function. Yeah, you could also
do that out of the calendar as well. Um. It
did have a note on it that the textual information
may not be accurate or complete, and it's not intended
to replace consultation with a professional, which really entertains me
(27:08):
because I'm like, yeah, we're just we just wrote some stuff. Anyway,
there was the Bob letter Writer, Yes, we should help
you write letter. I see you're trying to write a letter,
And that was very much like Clippy, to the point
where you could tell Bob what sort of letter you
were writing and to what sort of person you were writing,
and it would fill out. It would auto fill out
an entire letters very awful, might not at all related
(27:32):
to what you want to say. Um. I almost only
want to communicate in those now, just to see how
how far I could get using only Bob created letters. Uh,
and and just see if I could communicate my point
across through auto film messages. So Lauren, you've got something
to look forward to in the upcoming week. Thank you,
(27:53):
Thank you Microsoft for making this possible. Um No, I'm sorry, Microsoft,
Please don't please don't kill me. Um. There's a financial
guide Bob Checkbook, which was also compatible with Microsoft's money software. Right.
Uh that calendar that Jonathan mentioned, an address book. You
could sign up for a Bob email account. I totally
(28:14):
wish I had one of those. This was this was
It was an extra charge at the time and went
only through a proprietary email client. You couldn't just sign
up any email client that you want to take through
the system. Still. And then Geo Safari the game. It
was a little game with an education. There were a
couple of There are a couple of of little assistance
(28:35):
that would pop up for specific programs, and one of
them was a little elephant guy who would pop up
in Geo Safari. So while you're playing the game, this
little elephant dude shows up and asks you questions about
various areas or even not just geography, but also animals.
So I actually watched a video of this demonstrated where
a person was playing it, and it gave you pairs
(28:57):
of animals and explained their relationship to each other. So
shark and fish would be predator and prey, uh. And
then a what was the one like a shark and
a lamprey would be a partner animal partnership, so a
symbiotic relationship. And then like a deer and a tick,
which would be a parasite parasitic relationship. And then what
(29:18):
it would do is it would show you two animals
and you had to figure out which of those three
categories those two animals would would fall into that that
pair would fall into. So that was an example of
that GeoSafari game. But most of the game, from what
I understand, was really more of geography than uh than biology,
right anyway, So that was one of those little assistances
that would pop up for a specific instance. But there
(29:39):
were other assistants as well, right, Yeah, we had I've
got a whole list here. We've got blithe the firefly, hopper,
the bunny, or be the globe ruby. Uh. It was
it was basically an angry bird before before angry birds
were a thing. Um Shelly the turtle, speaker, the the
(30:00):
a speaker. It was a little a little icon of
a of a like a noise making computer speak. Um,
Chaos the cat, Java the dinosaur. I think, Scus the rat.
Scuse the mouse. It was a mouse, not a rat. Hey, no,
just goes a link to a blind dot digger the worm.
Um and William Shakespeare are the ones you forgot. The
(30:23):
most important one of the two important ones. There's the dot.
The dot. It was a giant red dot, okay, with
the big smiley face. But the most important one was
Bode Laire, the French gargoyle. How could you leave out
bode Laire, the French gargoyle? I had I had heard
tell of a gargoyle, but I didn't have its name,
(30:43):
and I didn't I didn't want to. His name was
Bode Laire. Well, he's a gargoyle who was French. Yeah.
And each of these, each of these assistants had its
own kind of personality in a way, in the sense
that it would some of them would be a little
more active than others, so Um would would be faster
to jump in and offer suggestions than others. Apparently, Scuzzie
(31:05):
the mouse was really apathetic just just didn't care. Botelaire
was supposedly very quiet unless you specifically clicked on bodel
Aire to to get some help. Some of them were
a little more proactive, right, And they all had different
different words that they would use. They had a different vocabulary,
and for example, one of the words that Rover really
liked using was scrumptious, as as in, I'm just one
(31:28):
of a scrumptious gang of personal guides here to help
you find your way in the home dog. Uh blythe
would say OI a lot, I'm not joking back off
like that kind of thing. Yeah, because I read up
on these. Um yeah, So so anyway, they if you,
(31:49):
if this sounds to you like this would be even
more obnoxious than Clippy, you're pretty much on the right track.
That does the feedback in fact that many people well
I mean obviously Clippy didn't exist yet as a as
a point of ref yeah, uh and uh, you know,
you have that personal assistant going with you wherever, so
you could actually there was one choice that was invisible,
(32:11):
and invisible was essentially no personal assistant. You could still
get help if you really needed it, but you didn't
have that that little animated character who was almost always
in the lower right hand corner of your screen. Uh.
And and these were characters that also like if if
you were idle for an extended time, characters like like
Rover or Chaos would go to sleep. And yeah, and
(32:34):
occasionally they would interact with other stuff in the room
to kind of be amusing. But I think I would
have considered it distracting personally, but absolutely uh and then uh, yeah,
it also had a I thought it was nice that
that Bob came with some productivity software like letter Writer,
in the sense that you didn't already have to go
out and buy other software suites. You could do some
basic computing stuff in Bob. It's uh, it's unfortunate that
(32:58):
most of the navigation looked pretty complex. Actually it would.
It would pull up these these dialogue windows with lots
of different choices. Yeah, I mean, I mean like RPG
level choice. I mean like like seven different choices on
all these menus. Right, so you see, you know, basic
menu design, you want to try and keep it as
simple as possible. But some of these menus had seven
or more choices on them, and and now all of
(33:20):
them were intuitive, like you couldn't really be like one
of them might be change something like, well that's not
specific at all, what does that mean? And if you
clicked on it would allow you to do things like
change the the view of the room, so whatever is
in the wind, whatever's appearing in the window, or change
which programs are there or or or move to a
different room. Um, you could add doorways, you could add rooms.
(33:44):
Uh and uh you might think this, uh, this, this
program probably didn't meet with too much success or acclaim
and you'd you'd be right, you'd be correct entirely. It.
According to pc Data, a retail research firm, only around
fifty eight thousand copies of Bob were ever sold. Um.
(34:05):
By contrast, uh moved like two point seven five million
copies in retail the first month. Yeah, so fifty eight
thousand for the almost the year that it existed. And
that's it. Um. Also, Microsoft kind of shot itself in
the foot. They distributed copies review copies to journalists back
(34:25):
in December, right with with an embargo on reviews until
only until after CES, not until the product launched, right
and so at c S. Bill Gates gets up talks
about it, but at that point the embargo lifts which
means that the journalists are allowed to write their thoughts
on Microsoft Bob. And they did and some of them
(34:46):
were how they did, Yeah, there's yeah one one. One
guy said that uh much much of the behavior of
these of these characters that are running around helping you
out will be unappealing to people. Seriously bent I'm getting
a lot of their PCs or two adults of any
kind for that matter, essentially saying that anyone who's not
a kid is going to hate this, right and that
(35:08):
that is the thing, you know, that's I feel like,
even if if I were completely new to computers had
never used your scene one, if I had a cartoon
talking to me about what I wanted to do, I've
it doesn't. It feels like it's a toy. It feels
like it's it feels like it's a toy. It feels
like it's talking down to you. Um and I mean
to be fair. When Microsoft was showing off the assistance
way back with publisher there were the response was very positive.
(35:31):
People were saying, this is fantastic because these these programs
are getting so complicated that I just don't know how
to do some of the things that you know, I
occasionally need to do, but I don't do so frequently
that I've memorized the path to do this, and I
want this for everything. And Microsoft heard those those cries
and ran with it to the point where people realize
they didn't really want it for everything. They wanted it
(35:54):
for stuff that was beyond an easy couple of cliques, right,
And and that's that is where a lot of the
later Wizards came out of And you know, I mean,
we still have that on computers and it can still
be useful. Um. And I think that they were. Some
of their test audiences supposedly reacted very well to it. Um.
(36:15):
According to an article in PC World, um Fries had
Karen fries had remembered one man's response early on to
to a to a little duck helper quote. This guy
was very emotional about it. He grabbed my arm. He said,
save all the money on the manuals and just give
me this duck to always be there and tell me
what to do. Yeah. Which again they ran with that,
(36:38):
and unfortunately I think they took it to too far
of an extreme. Also, Bob was a bit of a
resource hog. Uh. Keep in mind, in order to run it,
you were Uh, the suggested minimum system requirements were to
have a forty six CPU. Well I remember those days.
I actually had a two eighty six way back in
the day. If you had a three day six, yeah,
(37:00):
oh super fast. You had to have thirty megabytes of
free disk space. Again, that doesn't sound like much, but
it was no. I mean at the time a thirty
tea card drive was large and uh, and eight megabytes
of memory, which was about twice as much as what
most of the computers had. So for the time, you
had to have a very powerful machine to be able
(37:21):
to just run this and so and so. Yeah, and
so you're talking someone who's who's never used computers before
but has a better one than most other people. Yeah,
they would have to go and spend a good amount
of money. Uh. They did come standard on one of
the Gateway computers. Um, the Bob was the standard user
in their face for that machine. It's also fortunate for
(37:42):
that Gateway it had a different layout to it looked
more like a barn than a house. Um. Beyond that,
it was the same stuff. I just I just face
palmed at that very idea excellent. I don't really have
anything more to say about about that part of it,
but also they there's some other there's another legacy that
Bob left us. Although it's interesting it was not actually
(38:04):
used in Bob, but it was created for Bob and
it has lived on in infamy ever since. It's something
that is perhaps even more hated than Bob itself, maybe
only because it's been persistent. Right we are, we are
talking about the font comics stands, comic sands. That was
a font that was designed specifically for Bob, and it
wasn't used in Bob, but that was then incorporated in
(38:26):
future Microsoft releases and and this this font has received
a lot of hate, a lot of hate. Well it
was it was created originally because Microsoft designer Vincent Connair
saw a beta of Bob and thought that time's new
rooman was that was the font being used in it
at the time. And he was like, there's a disconnect
between this fun, bubbly image that we're presenting and very
(38:50):
terse formal font, and so let's make something that looks
like it came straight out of a comic book and
then reaping the rewards and echo aids for generations to come.
You know what, I don't hate comic sands I'll come
out and say it. I don't particularly love it, but
I don't hate it. I know people, though, who have
a violent reaction to I hate it. In business emails, yes,
(39:14):
if I get a business email from someone, it's in
comic sense. It's hard to take that email seriously. You know,
if it starts off with hey, bozo, I'll go ahead
and read it, though, because then I'm like, all right,
now you're on Now you're speaking my language. I got you.
Now we're on the same page. There's some sort of weird, ironic,
sarcastic email, and now I need to know what it says.
I don't know. I don't think. I don't think I
(39:34):
want to become a kind of hipster who uses comic
fans on on purpose in an ironic way. Yeah, you
don't want your emails to have a giant mustache, now
I do not. That's fair, alright, So, um, do you
have anything else you want to say about Bob before
we wrap it up? I think I think that is
the complete breadth and depth that it's. It's it's funny
(39:55):
that we were even able to do an episode on this.
When I first thought about I was thinking, am I
really gonna be able to talk about a product that
only was out on the market for less than a year.
It turns out, yes we were because there was a
lot too. There were a lot of good ideas that
went into the development of Bob. They just didn't get
implemented in a way that was really useful. Actually, I
(40:16):
do have one more story. I'm sorry completely loued a
second ago about about the legacy of Bob. According to
Raymond Chen for tech Net magazine, I know this story
when when when Windows XP came out, it came out
on CD and there were maybe about thirty megabytes of
capacity left over on the CD, so thirty megabytes of
free space, free space, sure, and they wanted to fill
(40:37):
it up with some encrypted data that would be checked
by the set up program as part of the installation
and verification process. Um, just just to you know, make
make it a little bit more difficult for pirates to
download it, right, But by adding thirty megabytes to the
to the size of the file, you would increase the
download time significantly. Because remember this is back in this
(40:59):
is not broadband time. We're talking about using a dial
up modem. So if you're using a dial up modem
to try and pirate software. Thirty megabytes might be the
difference between I'll go and do it or no, I'm
not gonna do it. Um but so, but so instead
of putting just random gobbledygook into that extra thirty megs,
he um whoever was doing it, I'm not sure if
(41:19):
it was. If it could have it could have been
a brave woman in our in our technical industry, um
uh used used the entirety of Bob. Yeah, I've heard
and encrypted it and scrambled it with a keyboard mash
encryption key. I've heard that. I've heard that story. I've
also heard that it might be apocryphal, So do take
that with a grain of salt. But it is a
fun story to say that, Hey, I need to fill
(41:41):
up this thirty megabytes of space, how big Bob? Thirty
megabytes done? We got it, you need it, you need
to fill it up with gibberish. I've got Bob. We've
got so much. That just hurts even more than yeah yeah, sweetheart.
Well that that kind of wraps up our discussion on Bob.
Before we sign off, I do want to say something.
We've how stuff works. We've recently launched some YouTube channels
(42:03):
of the various shows that are here at How Stuff Works.
We've got some podcasts that are now doing video shows
and they're amazing. They're fantastic. We don't really we don't
have a tech stuff one yet yet guys making a
face of terror, but we have and there are the
ones that have come out already. We're looking at them
and we're thinking, Wow, we've got a lot to live
up to. So one I want to recommend to you
(42:24):
guys is the Stuff to Blow your Mind channel and
uh and to check this out, you need to go
to www dot YouTube dot com slash Mind Stuff Show
and you're gonna be able to see Robert and Julie
of of Stuff to Blow your Mind doing some amazing videos.
They're really creative and they're really a lot of fun.
And it got one about slime that I'm particularly partial to. Yeah, Yeah,
(42:45):
we've been pretty knee deep in the slime thing recently
and we've seen them, Like I love seeing them shoot
because we can actually see them shooting throughout the day
as we go through the various little bits at the
office here there, which is kind of fun. And whenever
you see like the beakers and test tubes that you're
thinking something good is happening. So I highly recommend you
guys go and check that out. And if you have
(43:07):
any suggestions for us to cover a certain topic here
on tech Stuff, let us know. Write us an email
or address as tech stuff at discovery dot com, or
drop us a line on Twitter or Facebook. You can
find us there with the handle text stuff H s
W and Lauren and I will talk to you again.
Really shon for more on this and thousands of other topics.
(43:34):
Does it has stuff works dot com
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