Microsoft Bob. That name always confused
me, who calls their software Bob? Mid-90s Microsoft, that's who. But the question I
really want to answer today though is: was Microsoft Bob really that bad? I mean
the response I got from people even after posting one vague tweet showing
Bob kind of says it all. It's one of the most maligned
Microsoft products ever and has been the butt of so many jokes over the years
that I don't know if it's deserved or if it's just an easy target for hyperbole.
But I do wonder how many people today that are saying these things have
actually used it. Heck I've never even used it myself. It was introduced and
discontinued so quickly that I don't even remember seeing it on store shelves.
All I knew going into this video was that Microsoft Bob was introduced in
1995 to serve as a replacement for the Windows program manager environment,
mimicking the layout of a house instead of the more abstract desktop concept. And
I'd always heard it was the origin of some of the most notorious things in
tech including Clippy and Comic Sans. Quite the legacy if true. And now it's
finally time to find out. Welcome to the Microsoft Bob experience
on LGR! First off, big thanks to Jason and Robert for sending several of the items
you'll be seeing in this video. Heh, I wonder if Robert goes by Bob, that'd be
fantastic. Anyway I ended up with two boxed copies
of Microsoft Bob over the years and it amuses me that each of them have this
sticker saying it's a "promotional sample not for resale." Perhaps it should have
stayed that way and never hit retail in the first place. Still if the box is any
indication Microsoft sure was betting on Bob, calling it "the hard working
easygoing software everyone will use." Even underlined it for good measure.
Ballsy. Microsoft were so sure this was going to be a hit that they planned
their own Bob ecosystem with its own software. Give a nice warm greetings to
Great Greetings, the one and only piece of software released exclusively for use
with Microsoft Bob. Man this has to be one of the single lowest-selling
products in Microsoft history, I can't imagine a more surefire death knell for
a program that having Microsoft Bob as the main requirement.
And they even published a book authored by Barbara Rowley called "At Home With
Microsoft Bob: Ideas and Activities For Getting the Most From Your Home PC." It's
a 200-page tome filled with all the features and potential uses for Bob, even
though the box for the program itself proudly proclaimed the software was so
helpful you didn't need a manual at all. Which was kind of true in a
self-fulfilling prophecy kind of way, because Bob didn't come with a manual
inside the box. Instead you got a bunch of Microsoft-y paperwork like tech
support cards and product license agreements, and even a sheet of Bob
stickers. Hmm curiously mine were never used
I wonder what possible reason there could be for that. You also get, wow, a
copy of the premier issue of "Bob Magazine!" Haha, Microsoft, jumping the gun much? As if there'd ever be a second issue. So yeah while there is not a proper manual
this pseudo magazine serves the same purpose, letting you know the core
features of Bob and how to start troubleshooting when things inevitably
go wrong. Alright well enough of this stuff let's get Bob installed with
Microsoft Windows. And I'm gonna go with version 3.1 here since that is what it
was initially made to work with. And surprisingly there are no voodoo rituals
or weird sacrifices you have to make in order to get Bob installed. It's just a
standard application really, and with a standard application installation
process. You just put in your name and install away.
Once that's done you just open it like any other application because that's
really what it is: a piece of software you install to Windows that runs like
any other piece of software for Windows. It's just this one is meant to replace
Windows in terms of the look and feel. And you get that straight away with the
first screen of Bob here, this red door to your incoming virtual house. Knock on
the door and Rover there will ask you your name. So yeah the first thing that
you do is input all of your information one by one, like your name, your hometown, birthday, y'know whatever else you want to put in there. So it will automatically
fill that out as you use Bob's applications.
Once that's done Rover will ask you what you want your default private room to be.
It doesn't actually let you see them, you just kind of choose whichever one sounds
the best. And then the rest of the rooms in the
house will become shared rooms that anyone using Bob can access without a
password. But your private room is yours. After that's done you can waltz on
inside and say hello to your brand-new Microsoft Bob house! It's kind of garish,
very yellow, but this is your house. And Rover then asks you if you want to go on the
tour, and if you do you will immediately start to see the problems with Microsoft
Bob sort of boiling to the surface. And then it really starts with
these assistants like Rover. The whole idea is that they're supposed to make it
easier and show you what to do, step by step, but it just sort of blasts you with
a bunch of text and boxes. You just click "next, next, next" and yeah that's not a
very enjoyable interactive tutorial. What's different from this and a manual?
Not a whole lot. Once the tutorial is over with you can
really see what Bob is all about, just by looking at this first room with all the
labels turned on. All sorts of objects that are laid out here can be clicked on
and interacted with to do different things that Bob has available. For
instance there is the Bob Clock ,and this is an alarm clock. It lets you set alarms,
naturally. How intuitive. The whole point is that you don't have to find the clock
application somewhere in your computer, you can just think "Hey look there's a
clock," click on it, it looks like a clock, it's a clock. That's what the Microsoft
Bob philosophy is all about. And not everything is going to be some
interactive application-y kind of thing, there are plenty of objects in
here that are just objects. Like these flower vases, yeah, I mean you plop those
in there and put them anywhere you want. Move them, resize them, change where they are in terms of layers. It works almost exactly the same as any contemporary
paint, or print, or image manipulation program. And it doesn't just stop with
objects, you can also place completely different rooms in the house. Inside,
outside, attics, kids rooms, kitchens mouse holes, safe rooms, all sorts of
things. Each one of them with four different design styles and aesthetics.
Ya got castle, contemporary, postmodern, and retro. And functionally every single one
of these are identical but if you want to customize the aesthetic of your
Microsoft Bob house you can do that. And you know what I really like this! And that's
now, I certainly would have enjoyed this back then. As someone who enjoys
games like The Sims or pretty much anything that lets you customize a home
or a virtual space -- and even those architectural programs that were so
popular in the 90s -- I enjoy this kind of stuff. And the fact that Microsoft Bob
has so many different objects and rooms that you can customize, I mean. I know
they're all effectively the same and it doesn't really do anything, but it just
gets my imagination going and I like this kind of thing. And look at all the
chairs, Maxis would approve! And in terms of what
the Microsoft Bob competitors were doing at the time -- and yes there were quite a
few of these overlays and user interfaces for things to make your
computer not look like a computer -- Microsoft Bob does it pretty darn well.
There's a lot of customization here, not just the rooms and the objects and all
that stuff, but you can even customize your assistant, each of them with their
own personalities and such. Like Blythe the firefly, Chaos the cat, Hopper the
rabbit, Java the lizard thing, Orby the planet, Rover the rover dog. And yeah that
is by the way the same Rover that is in Windows XP search function. Microsoft
held on to some of these guys for a long time. Anyway you also got Ruby the pirate
parrot, Scuzz the rabid rat -- he's pretty much my favorite one, he's just a
sarcastic jerk, not very helpful at all. He's just like "yeah maybe I'll help you
I don't know, give me five bucks." Much more interesting than Shelly the turtle
or Digger the worm. Certainly more so than the Speaker, it's just a guide that
doesn't have any personality at all. And if you want no guide and kind of defeat
half the point of Microsoft Bob then you can just choose the invisible one and
figure things out yourself. But yeah other than the customization of all this
stuff the main point of Microsoft Bob is that it has a ton of built-in
applications. We'll start here with the Bob Household Manager and this is, well.
It's really just a list program. You choose a category of what kind of list
you want to keep track of and it will set up a bunch of different things for
you in terms of whatever you've chosen. Shopping lists, gift lists, vacation
itineraries, personal growth goal lists, it's all here and they're all pretty
much the same. Next up is the Bob Financial Guide and this one-- oh. It has
an error, something's wrong with the database, can't be opened...
Yeah, blue screens of death are not uncommon with Microsoft Bob, at least in
my experience. Maybe the some of this has to do with the systems I was running it
on but yeah. I had to reinstall Bob every time it happened, the internal database
just kept corrupting itself and I had to go through this process three or four
times. Pretty darn annoying but anyway, once I
got it working again yeah, let's get back to that Bob Financial Guide we were
trying to open. And this is uh, well it's pretty much just another list program. It
gives you a bunch of ideas and it fills in some stuff for you automatically but
yeah, you're just typing in lists. Pretty darn handy for getting out my thoughts
regarding what I'm doing with my life with this video. A much more useful
program that it came with was Bob Email. This not only let you have an @Bob.com email domain, oh my how desirable... But it was also just a dedicated email
product at a time before Microsoft Outlook was a thing. I mean it *was* a
thing, it just wasn't included in Office yet. Unfortunately it relied on you
having an MCI service ID in order to use it so I can't do anything with it here.
But yeah it's an email program and it worked with all the other Microsoft Bob
stuff so that was probably convenient. Also quite convenient and useful is the
Letter Writer for Bob. Are you seeing a pattern here? This is pretty much all
like, dumbed-down Microsoft Office, Microsoft Works kind of stuff. But yeah
anyway, the letter writer wasn't just about writing letters but it also helps
you automate a lot of the process depending on what you want to do.
Especially if you wanted to make a mass amount of letters or stationery or cards
or whatever. You select the type of thing that you want and the basic content of
it and it will fill out a whole lot of things. In fact it will also give you a
massive amount of addresses that it has built in, for companies and services, and
magazines, and politicians and all sorts of people. So if you wanted to send
out a mass letter about "the truth of Microsoft Bob" in 1994 this was a great
way to do it. And when you're done you can print it out yourself or send it
over email. Another program that it comes with, uh, "program..." is the Microsoft Bob
Balloon. It just sort of floats around and you can pop it. That's a thing. Next
up is the Bob Address Book and this is pretty self-explanatory. You type in your
addresses and it works with all of the other programs in Bob and keeps track of the people that you know and your contacts and whatnot.
So that you can access them directly through here or you can access them
through the other built-in programs like your letters and such. There's also the
Bob Checkbook program and this is one of those programs that gets rid of your
chosen assistant and brings in a specialist, in this case it's Lexi. Who
will then do the exact same thing your assistant would have done and help you
out with writing checks and keeping track of your finances and all that kind
of stuff. Next up here is the Bob Calendar and yep,
it's a calendar. You can keep track of birthdays and holidays and lunar phases.
And set up your itinerary and set some reminders for different things that you
have to do in Microsoft Bob -- or about Microsoft Bob, what is my life. And then
lastly is the one program that is geared towards the younger Microsoft Bob users.
That is: GeoSafari. Yes, Geo-friggin Safari, a very classic educational quiz
game. These were not only those physical Geo Safari things that you saw
in the board game and toy sections back in the day, but there was also GeoSafari
for Bob right here. I'm sure I'll be talking about other GeoSafari computer
games at some point because there were several but yeah. This one right here is
just a very basic quiz program which, as the name implies, tests your knowledge on
geography. The goal here is to figure out where this picture is located on the map,
tell it the correct answer as quickly as possible, and get the most points as you
can. I mean yeah, that's it, it's just something that you're gonna be probably
bored of in two seconds. But you know whatever, as a kid -- like a really young
kid -- I might have enjoyed this. And finally, you're not limited to the
programs that Bob comes with of course. You can add any of the programs that
happen to be installed on your hard disk such as Crystal Caves here. And this'll add
another object into your environment and then you can customize that to be some
form of cube or square or whatever. Yeah, now you can play Crystal Caves from your
virtual kitchen. But wait there's more, if you bought the optional Microsoft Great
Greetings pack. Yep can't forget that, so let's get this thing unsealed and check
out the contents. Which really the main thing that it comes with is this booklet
right here, the PaperCatalog. Just a bunch of stationery and papers and cards
and things that you can print things on using this Great Greetings program. And
this comes on two floppy disks, no CD-ROM here. In fact Microsoft Bob also came on
floppy disks. Which, I've actually never seen those disks like, show up on eBay, so
I'm assuming they're pretty rare. What's interesting about this though is that
you don't install it through Windows, you actually have to install it through
Microsoft Bob itself. Because again this is an exclusive Microsoft Bob
application, it is not for Windows. So yeah, once you're done setting it up
through Bob you can add it to any room just like you could with any other
object that is linking to an application. And yep here we go, this is Great
Greetings which is very much like all of the other applications that Bob came
with by default. Except this one is about making greeting cards. Man, greeting card
applications were popular in the mid-90s! I remember messing with a ton of them so
I can totally see why this was what they chose to not include in Bob by
default and then sell separately. Because yeah, being able to make your own
greeting cards, just print them out, I mean greeting cards are expensive man! So if you could just make your own that's pretty sweet. And yeah you don't have a
whole lot of hands-on control of what you're doing here, it's just the Bob way
of automating most of it. And there you go, you got a greeting card that you can
print out or... yeah that's it, I guess can't email it. And with that we come to
a close of the Microsoft Bob experience as I see it. So the question remains: was
Bob really as bad as everyone says it was? Well truthfully, I don't think so. It
looks better than I thought it would, it's handily customizable, and it does
exactly what it says it does on the box. But it was a flop for a reason. Beyond
the technical issues, Microsoft was woefully misguided in terms of who Bob's
audience should have been and how important a product it actually was. The
fact that Microsoft put so much time and money into launching this thing,
including input from Melinda and Bill Gates themselves throughout development, is just mind-bogglingly strange in hindsight. Not only were Windows
graphical shells nothing new by 1995, putting Bob's
self-imposed importance on shaky ground, but it was designed like a children's
application. A children's application that mainly dealt with
keeping lists, doing your taxes, sending business correspondence, and managing
program executables. And the real kicker? The price. Get this: when Microsoft Bob
launched the suggested retail price was $99! Yeah! And on top of that, Bob required a 486 CPU, 32 megs of hard disk space, and 8 megabytes of RAM. Specs that put it out of reach of a good number of families who might've actually wanted a program like Bob. Nonetheless Bob ended up being included with computers from manufacturers like Gateway, Micron, Packard Bell, and NEC. Which is seemingly how most people got it considering its abysmal retail sales. But
despite all its problems and well-deserved criticisms, Bob can't quite
be blamed for two things: Comic Sans and Clippy. Yeah, don't forget I was
gonna bring those up and here it is. While it's true that Comic Sans was developed
with Microsoft Bob in mind the typeface never actually appears in the program.
According to its creator Vincent Conair, Comic Sans was created because he
thought the words of Bob's virtual assistants looked strange in Times New
Roman. Comic Sans was his response and despite it never being used for Bob it
sat around for a while at Microsoft, and was eventually included by them with
later versions of Windows. Similarly, Clippy does not appear anywhere in Bob
either. That didn't happen until Office 97, where Microsoft introduced Bob-inspired virtual assistants in applications like Microsoft Word.
Oh and he's not called Clippy either, his name is Clippit. Which I didn't realize
until making this video. I don't know when we all started calling him Clippy
instead of Clippit but hey, the more you know I guess. So yeah that is Microsoft
Bob. A flawed, expensive, yet charming little program that was doomed from the
start. And yet I kind of like it now that I
understand it a bit more 23 years later. If only it didn't cost a hundred bucks
and fully embraced its kid-friendly nature, it might have been more fondly
remembered nowadays as a safe computing environment for children. Instead it's
Microsoft Bob and that's is just unfortunate. And hey, if you didn't think this video
was unfortunate then awesome! Stick around, there's always more in the works
here on LGR with new videos every Monday and Friday on technological topics, both
old and not so old. And as always thank you very much for watching!
why did Bob have glasses ?
Fun fact: there's an encrypted copy of Bob on every Windows XP install disc to use up the remaining space and as a weird form of copy protection in the pre-Broadband days.