Comment by TZubiri
7 days ago
"Microsoft Bob presented screens showing a house, with rooms that the user could visit containing familiar objects corresponding to computer applications, such as a desk with pen and paper and a checkbook. Clicking on the pen and paper would open the system’s word processor"
Seems like some aspects of the experiment survived and were hugely popular: folders, clipboard, cut, paste, etc..
MS Bob didn’t invent those things. It just grafted them onto a crude gui metaphor that tech companies are still trying to find a buyer for: “What if the UX was as close as possible to the physical world?”
You don’t open a file, you “walk” to a “filing cabinet”, “pull the drawer out”, and “reach in and pull out a specific piece of ‘paper’”.
You don’t make a phone call, you sit in virtual meeting space with virtual bodies while wearing a mocap suit.
Does anyone still remember why we got computers in the first place?
You misunderstand what I was saying, not that the Bob program transformed into what we now know as AR like the one Meta is designing.
Rather that these metaphors were very present in 2000s Windows and Office programs, and were very successful in getting regular users to understand computers and bringing about the Personal Computer revolution.
Virtual reality people are still trying to deliver this "vison". I remember first cringe idea of how a web shopping would work by rendering physical supermarket shelves with VRML and users having to walk the aisles full of 3d modeled products. I think it was by Walmart? and they didnt stop with that one demo, here another try from 2017 https://www.theverge.com/tldr/2022/1/5/22868323/walmart-meta...
Oh wow, I just realized that the following VR parody might have been inspired by Microsoft Bob :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4FGzE4endQ
(2015, so 4 years before Zuckerberg committed to the Metaverse enough to rename the whole company, and still 1 year before the first commercial new generation VR headset : Oculus Rift released.)
> Does anyone still remember why we got computers in the first place?
Uhhhh, to play videogames?
(That was the Beavis 'n Butthead voice.)
Those predated Bob, by a long time.
I remember encountering them in an old Xerox system, in the early 1980s.
Bob was awful. However, I have to confess that I once tried designing UI like that, and learned painful lessons, in the process.
I'm interested in specifics if you remember them. What Xerox system, are we talking an Operating system? A mainframe? A computer + OS package? An office program?
And what were the metaphors specifically, folders or cutting and pasting?
Thanks.
I'm pretty sure that it was one of these: https://spectrum.ieee.org/xerox-alto
It had folders, a mouse, document icons, and a trash can.
I can't really remember much else. It was B&W.
Does anyone know of a paradigm original to Microsoft Bob that survived? Other than Rover the Windows XP search dog.
Does marrying the CEO count?
Those things were all totally standard and normal by the time Microsoft Bob came along
Those concepts were invented at Xerox PARC in the 1970s; certainly UNIX had them before MS windows, and "bob" was just a windows application anyway.
I think Bob was more (in)famous as the product which served as the origin story for Clippy in MS Office.