04.Secret History of Microsoft Bob

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I enjoy his videos.

👍︎︎ 4 👤︎︎ u/dibbr 📅︎︎ Dec 31 2020 🗫︎ replies

Is there an easy way to get a working copy of MS Bob today?

👍︎︎ 3 👤︎︎ u/GuardianFerret 📅︎︎ Dec 31 2020 🗫︎ replies

That’s Dave Plummer. Dave is known as the original developer of Windows Task Manager (source https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Task_Manager), which hasn’t changed too much since he wrote it over 20 years ago. Speaks volumes as to his programming skills. He is a wealth of knowledge and is always willing to share.

👍︎︎ 2 👤︎︎ u/AvocadoEinstein 📅︎︎ Jan 04 2021 🗫︎ replies

I once won a retail box of Microsoft Bob back in the late 90s. They sell for $40-100 on eBay these days.

It was at a Microsoft (Technet?) event in Montreal and the other prizes included Windows NT Server 4.0 ...

👍︎︎ 1 👤︎︎ u/IbizaRob 📅︎︎ Jan 25 2021 🗫︎ replies
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Hey, I'm Dave, Welcome to my shop! According to legend, it is said that every   copy of Microsoft Windows included a hidden copy  of Microsoft Bob, secretly planted there by one   of the original Windows developers. The accuracy  of the story, and the identity of this developer,   have never been confirmed. Until today that  is. Because it was me. It's been 25 years   and I'm ready to tell you the real story:  the secret history of Microsoft Bob.   Microsoft Bob - which was not terrible, by  the way, at least for its time - failed in   the marketplace. And it failed hard, and it failed  publicly. It was all the more complicated publicly   because of who the marketing manager was on the  product: Melinda French. If that name doesn't   ring a bell, you might know her better as the  now Mrs. Melinda Gates. So yeah... I'm sure Bill   was watching when Bob went down in flames, but  then Bob didn't fail for any lack of marketing.   Bob's failure was fundamentally inevitable  due to its slow performance on 1995 hardware,   and no amount of marketing was going to save it.  It could really only have been saved by better   code or the faster hardware of the future. But how would I know?   I'm Dave Plummer, a retired Microsoft operating  system developer all the way back to the MS-DOS   and Windows 95 days. And while Microsoft  wasn't able to sell many copies of Bob and   it was quickly cancelled, as a big fan of  Bob myself, I did what Microsoft couldn't.   I shipped a lot of copies of Bob. First  by the million, then tens of millions,   then hundreds of millions, and ultimately a half  a billion copies installed on computers worldwide.   What? How? Why? Well, that's today's story.  But first we need a quick little refresher on   just what Microsoft Bob was all about. Bob was what I would best describe as a   cartoon shell for Windows. Instead of a home  folder you had an actual home with a door and   living room and a dog named Rover. There was a  private study for reference apps. There was a   large safe for financial things, and so on. Your  interaction with the home was guided by Rover,   a relative of Clippy, who would provide  information and choices along the way.   Bob was developed under the codename Utopia,  though I had nothing to do with Bob development,   nor can I even say I know anyone that did.  I was on the early beta, however, so I had   installed it on both my machine and my wife's. Neither my wife nor I were really the target   market for the app, so I can't really say how  well it was designed or not. I honestly think it   was one of those things that might have caught  on had they stuck with it for three versions.   I know my wife had a great deal of fun organizing  the rooms and her apps and her contacts and   calendar and so on, but she was occasionally  frustrated beyond measure by a few bugs that   would cause her to lose her organizational  work. It was also a bit slow and demanding   of your hardware. How much that experience was  true for other users, or what role its quality   had in its adoption, I can only speculate. There were even special OEM releases of Bob,   such as the rare Gateway 2000 Bob Edition  complete with five additional rooms.   But alas, Bob just never caught on. And all  I've got to show for it is this T shirt.   And if Bob is the Microsoft product that people  love to hate, it also begat the font that people   absolutely love to hate: That's right, Comic Sans.  One of the lesser-known secrets of Microsoft Bob   is that Comic Sans was designed specifically for,  though ultimately not used in the product.   In the end, sources estimate that  Microsoft sold some 58,000 copies of Bob.   Before I can explain how I shipped half a billion  Bobs I should explain why I did it. And before   I explain why I did it, I have to explain a  little bit about Product Activation. You know,   those big long annoying keys that you have to  enter in order to activate windows? Or worse,   read over the phone? Yeah, see, that's mine too.  With a little help from some really smart friends,   I wrote the first version of Product Activation  for Windows, which shipped with Windows XP.   Which I'm just mentioning now? Yes. You'll notice  that I'm always eager to talk about Task Manager   and Zip Folders and Space Cadet Pinball and  other stuff I worked on but I never mention   Product Activation? Well, that's because it was a  necessary evil. Had to be done. Sorry about that.   No one loves Product Activation other  than accountants and shareholders,   but from a technical perspective, it was one  of the hardest things I ever worked on.   And by the way, when I say some "really smart  friends", I mean super smart, and I'm also talking   about crypto people. Super smart programmers I  can deal with because even if they're twice as   smart as me, I know the vocabulary and I'm  still smart enough to call BS when needed.   But with cryptography, who's to say? They could be  wearing the Emperor's New Clothes, but it's hard   to know. So, you get a couple of them that don't  know each other, and you have them fight it out   in a mathematical Battle Royale of elliptical  curve cryptography. No quarter given, none asked.   But if they agree, they're probably right, because  the last thing any of them want is to be wrong,   let alone have the other one be right first. Their  heads are often what I call "door jamb bumpingly   large" in order to accommodate their massive  brains, such that normal hats do not fit well,   if at all, and they're generally delicate  artistes that operate on a whole other   level and in a completely different world. We  had one researcher who, after a particularly   arduous session of math during a meeting, would  need to take an immediate nap. He'd think so   hard that he'd tucker himself right out. I also remember a series of conference calls   with a contract mathematician whose skills were  so specialized that she lived in another country   entirely, many time zones away. Early in the life  of activation one of the master keys got leaked.   It could ruin the whole activation effort,  so it was a big deal, and we were working   on a way between systems and operations and the  crypto folks to disable the leaked key somehow.   We would have a series of conference calls over  the course of a week, and this math head stressed   every day that we had to call before 5PM, because  at 5PM she was baking brownies, and she couldn't   talk after that. Being a crypto gal, I assumed  that was code for something. The mind marvels   at it, but I had no idea what she meant,  so we just made sure to call early.   One day we called, however, a little too late.  I looked at my watch to see it was only 4:20,   but apparently in her time zone, it was well past  five, and she had already baked the brownies.   She still took the call, and she thought it was  quite hilarious. In fact, she thought pretty much   everything was quite hilarious. Unfortunately,  she was also summarily unable to do any useful   amount of actual math, so our questions  would have to wait for the morning.   Why is this important? Because we used  her math to protect the product in   way such that your activation key only works with  the type of CD it was intended for - retail, OEM,   and so on. For that protection to be at all  secure, there had to be some big differences   between the retail and OEM CDs. And they had to be  mathematically different in a noncompressible way.   That's because I didn't want a crack for  activation showing up on the Usenet forums   thirty minutes after release. In those pre-2K  Internet days, hosting or posting a large binary   was so prohibitively complicated or expensive  that all I had to do was to ensure the CDs were   different by many megabytes of information and  that would solve 95% of those piracy cases.   We decided to fill up some of the spare room on  the CDs with digital ballast that was encrypted   and signed and specific to the CD version.  We could confirm the ballast's signature and   thereby confirm that you had the right disc. But  what should it be made up out of? Tempting though   it might be, I couldn't just zip up a copy  of my driver's license photo. Photos are not   very random to start with, and there are about a  dozen other reasons why that's just a bad idea.   So, I needed some big digital blobs that I  knew could not be compressed any further.   Where to find data that I knew we had a license  to and that I trusted to be as precompressed   as possible that I could then highly encrypt? I  knew from my MS-DOS days that the floppy images   we shipped for products were as good as it gets,  and for obvious reasons - floppies cost money.   They were super compressed, as compressed  as we mathematically knew how to do. So,   I'd start with some floppy images. That's when I  decided to do something that would make me smile.   Something that only I knew about: I decided  to secretly start with Microsoft Bob.   In those days we as a company had three  big servers, products1 and products2 and   boneyard. Between them the image of pretty much  every product we had ever made was up on there.   I grabbed the compressed floppy images  for Microsoft Bob and concatenated   them into a single large Bob blob. I then encrypted the blob of Bob with   several passes of different encryption  tools and techniques, including a huge   private/public keypair generated by a long  sequence of random mouse movements, and so on.   I did a few other procedures that I felt were  important to the process, and out came a giant   multi-megabyte blob that I could effectively treat  as a root of trust on the CD. If you had the OEM   blob, you could use an OEM license key. If you had  a retail blob, you had to use a retail key.   Though he learned of the story after the fact,  as uber-developer and general super-genius   Raymond Chen has aptly said of this issue,  in some ways Microsoft Bob was more useful   to us dead than alive. I don't know how many  copies of Microsoft Bob were originally sold;   if you ask Google, the answer is 58,000  copies. But in encrypted digital form,   the spirit of Bob has gone on to live in the form  of a half a billion Windows XP installations.   Now, what does this all mean in a practical sense?  Does it mean that with a single password that only   I know we could unleash a half billion  Bobs upon the world? Do I have legions   of Rovers standing by worldwide to do my digital  bidding, ready to rise upon a single command?   Well, not exactly. Like the important product  formulas for Coca-Cola and KFC, you don't just   store the whole Bob recipe in one place. The key  is multipart, and only part of it is stored up   here. The other parts are elsewhere. Can anyone prove any of this? Well,   not without the full password. And it's  been 25 years and I never wrote it down.   Do I even remember my password? And if I do,  is it even the right password? And if it is,   what if I typed it wrong just once the first  time? Can the Bob binary even be decrypted?   I dunno, I'm a busy man, I haven't  actually checked. Maybe that's because   the whole thing is moot. Maybe I was smart  enough to XOR the data with CryptGenRand.   It's so long ago. Who's to say? The older  I get, the smarter I used to be.   What's ultimately important is that while  Bob never got to play on the big stage,   he always followed the band around  and got to ride on the bus.   If you'd like to hear more Windows War Stories  from one of the guys in the trenches, please be   sure to subscribe to Dave's Garage and turn on  the bell icon and personal recommendations. That   way you'll be notified of future episodes. This  video is a bit of a test of new direction for me   on the channel, so if you found it entertaining,  please drop me a like on the video so I know how   people feel about it! And yes, I'm absolutely  using War Story ironically. My sincere thanks to   the men and women who have actual war stories. Thanks for joining me here today in Dave's Garage.   In the meantime, and in-between  time, I hope to see you next time.   And just to be clear, I retired from  Microsoft more than 15 years ago.   While I was there a long time, and I'm nothing  but proud of the work we did, I am not now nor   was I ever an official spokesperson for the  company. All opinions are mine alone. Cheers!
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Channel: Dave's Garage
Views: 92,837
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Keywords: microsoft bob failure, microsoft bob, Microsoft bob windows 10, windows bob, Ms bob, bob included in windows, windows xp contains bob, hidden software, secret software, bob, microsoft, Melinda french, Melinda gates, windows xp, 11-24-20, secret, secret software for pc, hidden, easter egg, pc secrets, windows 3.1, windows 95, windows 98, comic sans font, easter eggs, bill gates, microsoft bob install, secret number, the secret history, Task manager
Id: rXHu9OmLd8Y
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 10min 22sec (622 seconds)
Published: Tue Nov 24 2020
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