4 ms·

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 'bedr

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 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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.
    - bombcar 5y ago
      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 5y ago
        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 5y ago
        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.
        hulitu 5y ago
rthomas6 5y ago
I was also one of these kids. I even made a secret room under the rug where I put my games.

Jtsummers 5y ago

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 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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.
  - bombcar 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      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 5y ago
        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.
        hulitu 5y ago

rthomas6 5y ago

I was also one of these kids. I even made a secret room under the rug where I put my games.