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!