[HN Gopher] Finding an Easter Egg in Microsoft Bob
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Finding an Easter Egg in Microsoft Bob
Author : elvis70
Score : 142 points
Date : 2021-04-28 14:37 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (benstoneonline.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (benstoneonline.com)
| detritus wrote:
| > Modern versions of Access refuse to open databases that were
| created with old versions, so I dusted off an old copy of Office
| 97.
|
| Goodness gracious, Microsoft - why?
| banana_giraffe wrote:
| The Wikipedia article on Jet (
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Jet_Database_Engine )
| talks a bit about the backwards compat strategy.
|
| This is case where they broke backwards compatibility. At the
| time, they had an upgrade strategy, though I wouldn't be
| surprised to learn the tools that handle the upgrade are no
| longer supported at this point.
|
| My understanding from the outside is it was an attempt to bring
| Jet Red (the desktop database, what Access used) and Jet Blue
| (the server database, used by things like Exchange) closer to
| be compatible with each other on some level, along with making
| Jet Red less of a "toy" database.
| alberth wrote:
| Microsoft is notorious in the efforts they make to allow
| backward compatibility. But in this one case, they don't and
| are the villain? I can still run programs targeted at 16bit
| Microsoft Windows 3.x from 30 years ago.
|
| Apple breaks background compatibility nearly every year on
| their products, yet they get a pass?
| blowski wrote:
| I didn't see anyone giving Apple a pass, but yeah I'm OK with
| backwards compatiblity not being a thing for 20 year old
| desktop software.
| detritus wrote:
| I'm not sure I implied that, and I've been a PC since '97.
|
| This just seemed like a particularly pointless restriction.
| It's database. How hard can it be to support and convert?
| toyg wrote:
| Access is not just a database, it allows for custom VBA
| code and controls. I can see why supporting old versions
| would be a burden (are you really going to ship all VBA
| engines ever shipped for 20 years, with all the inevitable
| security holes they likely still have...?)
| detritus wrote:
| Good point, I hadn't considered that. But the example
| here seems to be literally a spreadsheet's worth of
| content, in a database format.
|
| At least ignore the code and allow importation of the
| content?
|
| Anyway, I don't much care and am being downvoted to heck
| (!) - I just thought it an odd restriction.
| tinus_hn wrote:
| I'm pretty sure you can't run 16 bit programs on 64 bit
| Windows.
|
| You can easily emulate a 16 bit computer though.
| simcop2387 wrote:
| Not directly or natively, but WineVDM is a thing and will
| usualky let you run old 16bit programs while looking like
| it's nearly native
| guessbest wrote:
| Are their any 'toy office' apps for kids these days? Something
| between Bob and Outlook?
| moioci wrote:
| Isn't the most lasting legacy of MS Bob the Comic Sans font?
| bombcar wrote:
| An interesting thing that we forget with Bob and Clippy is the
| people reviewing/commenting on it are almost by definition NOT
| the people it was aimed at. Having sold 58k copies, there must be
| some people who actually used it.
| fooblat wrote:
| I was working in a large computer store in California when Bob
| came out. To my memory, I never sold a single copy. This is
| despite a large in-store promotion put on by Microsoft.
| wombat-man wrote:
| as a kid I spent a lot of time customizing the house and
| sometimes playing the weird geography game in there. I think we
| had an irl one at school too.
|
| It was kinda fun, even though it wasn't really a game.
| Talanes wrote:
| In 1995 I was five years old, and the computer my Grandparents
| had bought us came with Microsoft Bob, and it was the only way
| I used the computer for a while.
|
| I also remember an encyclopedia program that was wrapped in a
| virtual spaceship interface. For a bit, I just thought that
| these sort of graphical interfaces were what computing was.
| eysquared wrote:
| It came pre-installed on my family's shiny new Gateway
| computer. As a kid I loved customizing my house and adding
| custom icons for things like games in my 'bedroom.'
|
| It never replaced the actual desktop, but it was fun to go into
| my own 'house' on the family computer customized to my liking
| in the days before profiles and separate logins.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| Exactly. I'm curious how many sales were _sales_ and how many
| were part of a PC bundle with other MS software. This is how
| we had it as well, with a Gateway 2000 PC purchase in 1995
| (and I similarly enjoyed customizing my house in it).
| acheron wrote:
| Same here as well, got it with a Gateway 2000.
|
| It was an interesting idea. I get the OP's point that a lot
| of the critics were not the target audience, but for the
| most part the target audience didn't take to it either. I
| guess I don't see that as a preordained conclusion, and I
| don't think of Bob as an obviously bad idea from the start,
| it was just one of the many new ideas PC developers were
| trying in the mid-90s as computers were rapidly expanding
| their reach.
| WorldMaker wrote:
| A lot of people tend to forget too that while Bob was
| ostensibly the last in the category [1], it was not the
| first. In the 90s there were a lot of people
| researching/experimenting with "alternative" family/kid-
| friendly desktops. I recall even a late 80s Mac OS one in
| elementary school that was my first precocious "hacking"
| experience jail breaking out of to run other Mac apps.
| Especially for DOS and Windows 3.1, family/kid-friendly
| launchers seemed a huge need because they weren't always
| the friendliest.
|
| My parents were deep involved in a franchise of computer
| learning centers for kids in the 90s, so we wound up
| evaluating a number of them over the years. Probably the
| most successful and one we used the most was KidDesk. Bob
| came out right at the end of that era (near the end of
| the business) and there was a lot of interesting hope for
| it. The business bought a bunch of copies (at a steep
| Microsoft Education partner discount, IIRC) and had high
| hopes for it as a "starter desktop"/teaching tool. It had
| good ideas from that perspective, and if they technically
| solved a few more "launcher" problems like Windows 3.1
| transition to DOS full screen app then back (which
| KidDesk had _a_ hacky version of) it might have filled
| some key niches if it had launched 3 or 4 years earlier.
|
| Ironically, I think the real thing that killed Bob was
| Windows 95, even for the users that were the target
| audience. Windows 95 fixed a lot of those Windows 3.1/DOS
| transition states, was much easier to teach and generally
| more kid/family-friendly, and there was a lot less need
| for an "alternative" desktop.
|
| (My experience with Bob makes me sad that the Cliff House
| for Windows MR still is too chilly and cold and
| "professional" and needs Rover or Links walking around
| and/or offering advice.)
|
| [1] And not even really the last when you look at for
| instance what's going on with "Kid versions" of Amazon
| Tablets as one extension of the legacy. Or the continued
| explorations of virtual agents in Siri/Google
| Assistant/Alexa/Cortana as another fork in the
| evolutionary tree.
| RandallBrown wrote:
| I didn't realize for a long time that there was an
| interface beyond KidDesk because it was installed on all
| the computers at my elementary school.
|
| I thought it was the coolest thing ever.
| bombcar wrote:
| The thing that interested me most about the video was how
| similar the interface is to a "touch" interface you might
| find on a tablet.
|
| While Xerox and Mac helped shape the current "desktop
| metaphor" GUI it was still an open question how to
| migrate those used to DOS-style command line tooling to a
| GUI, and it wasn't really "solved" until Windows 95
| (where the Start Menu became "Bob" in a way).
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Bob was also a part of the long debates around
| skeumorphism. Bob was extremely (cartoonishly)
| skeumorphic: to get to word processing you clicked a
| typewriter, to get to contacts you clicked an antique
| rolodex, and so forth. It used a talking dog (by default)
| to explain things to the user rather than "faceless"
| dialog boxes asking questions "out of nowhere".
|
| We're probably always going to fight skeumorphism debates
| on where the right balance is for user ease of
| learning/discovery ("I know what a typewriter is, if I
| click can I type a document?") versus the density
| compaction (both in physical space and arguably in mental
| space) of reducing "skeumorphic clutter". (The typewriter
| in Bob was thousands of pixels to display even its
| simplified cartoonish form; the [W] logo of Word fits as
| small as dozens of pixels. Similarly too, once you know
| Word exists does "I need Word, and its a word processing
| app, so I should think of a typewriter and click the
| typewriter" get in the way of "use Word"?)
| WorldMaker wrote:
| Even more of a tangent: that's one of the things that
| Office got wrong with Assistants versus "Bob's
| principles". They had both tons of "faceless" dialog
| boxes and status indicators _and_ a face for some of
| them. You never knew if the thing you needed was an
| Assistant "chat" dialog or an older dialog or some weird
| mix of the two. Complain all you want about the
| inconsistencies in Windows 10's settings versus getting
| dropped back into classic Win32 control panels, that's
| nothing on the worse inconsistencies of the Office
| Assistant era.
| bombcar wrote:
| What's interesting about the skeuomorphism is that as
| tech progresses it becomes skeuomorphic to _older tech_ -
| a perfect example is seeing a Floppy Disk as a Save Icon
| in an iPad program. It 's likely a significant number of
| people don't know what it is beyond "save".
| guessbest wrote:
| It was aimed at computers with a VGA card when it was released
| sometime between 1993 and 1994, which wasn't a very large
| market when I was a teenager then. But at the Dallas Sidewalk
| Sale on the Third Saturday someone had a demo of this with
| their prebuilt computers from their small business always had a
| large crowd.
| alberth wrote:
| Some trivia ... Melinda French was the GM over Microsoft Bob. She
| later married Bill Gates and is now known as Melinda Gates.
| wincy wrote:
| If that had happened today Bill Gates would have had to step
| down as CEO and would have been disgraced for fraternizing with
| an underling.
| alberth wrote:
| IIRC, when she married Bill - she resigned from the company.
| wincy wrote:
| Right but it echoes the recent scandal at Intel, the
| details are different obviously but companies aren't
| exactly known for their careful and thoughtful
| consideration of heavy-handed policies
|
| https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Intel-CEO-
| resig...
| blowski wrote:
| It echoes, but - while I don't know the details of either
| situation - they could be different enough that it would
| still be handled in the same way today. For example, I
| imagine it would depend on how quickly the people
| involved made the board and HR aware of their
| relationship. The CEO can then recuse themselves from
| converstaions about and with their partner.
|
| Also, it seems like the knives were already out for
| Krzanich, and there are some for whom this would be a
| useful pretext.
| spoonjim wrote:
| When you see something like this, the board wanted him
| out anyways. This was the perfect opportunity. If Elon
| Musk has an affair with an employee the Tesla Board will
| release a solemnly worded statement and say that he's
| being required to attend certain trainings and produce
| certain mea culpas.
| tinus_hn wrote:
| I think Elon Musk would simply say 'none of your
| business'. If he followed the rules he wouldn't be
| tweeting about Tesla from his personal account.
| jsight wrote:
| I'm not aware of rules preventing the CEO from talking
| about the business from a personal account.
| ChrisClark wrote:
| We make up rules to attack anyone we don't like. :)
| jdsully wrote:
| They dated for a long time before then and she actively had
| to meet with him in a work context for the famous BillG
| reviews. She's done interviews talking about how it was
| managed and how she wanted to be seen as still pulling her
| weight.
| sp332 wrote:
| Um... ok?
| tuckerpo wrote:
| No Dave Plummer in contributors, odd
| Zenst wrote:
| No but he did use it as padding for CDROM distro of Windows so
| that the discs had unique ID's
|
| The Secret history of Microsoft BOB
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXHu9OmLd8Y
| miohtama wrote:
| This was awesome video. Bob the blob. How to make sure crypto
| is correct. A mathematician who could not take calls after
| 5pm.
| Zenst wrote:
| Oh he has many brilliantly told historical stories and on
| top, still gets his hands dirty and recently did benchmark
| of compilers. One of the few channels upon YT I'd recommend
| a sub.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| There are some Microsoft Bob easter eggs in other Microsoft
| products.
|
| The nerd emote from MSN Messenger comes from MS Bob. The dog is
| an assistant in MS Office. There might be more too.
| ehnto wrote:
| That's a remarkable number of Davids in the Developers list. Was
| the hiring manager named David by any chance?
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| One of the commenters on the article remarks that there are
| more "Davids" on the team than women.
| acheron wrote:
| These are the Daves I know.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVzDIE0mr6A
| prox wrote:
| They're all hired by HALL
| ac29 wrote:
| Names from the Bible (Adam, Michael, Paul, Peter, Matthew,
| David, etc) were and to some degree still are quite common
| among Americans.
| wcfields wrote:
| One quirky hack that no one asked for that I figured out in 1997:
| You can take the assistant files Rover, Skuz, Shelly, etc... and
| copy them into MS Office's assistant directory to get Bob
| assistants in Office!
| msarnoff wrote:
| One of the credited artists, Leslie Patricelli, is now a
| children's book author/illustrator.
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