Have I made fun of Microsoft Bob before on this blog? I don’t believe I have. Well, if you’ve ever heard about MS Bob before, you probably didn’t hear anything good.
Read that link above to find out what the fuck was going on. To this day, I don’t think anyone really knows why the fuck they thought that a graphical representation of a house to replace a regular GUI was a good idea.
Then again, people have really fucking stupid ideas about GUIs to this day.
But back to Bob. Because I’m playing around with a virtual Windows 98 installation on one of my laptops, I’ve been going slightly overboard with installing old, old software along with it. Hell, I even installed MS Works, Picture It! and Encarta 98 just because I could. And all of those applications are thoroughly obsolete now. Though Encarta 98 has a quiz/maze game that I stumbled upon today. That might be good for taking up a quarter hour.
So I can party like it’s 1998 now if I want to. And I invited Bob along too. Good old MS Bob, with it’s mind-boggling insistence to link all email functionality to someone’s MCI account. What’s MCI? Oh right, that company doesn’t exist any more. But Bob hit store shelves clearance bins in 1995, and maybe they thought that the AOL style “do it with us or not at all” business model was good business.
There’s not much else to say about MS Bob other than what is written in the article at the very top. You should read the whole site if you are geeky for GUIs like me and want to kill some time. That site’s author hates Microsoft even more than I did! Be mindful of the rants against MS if you visit that site. Wear goggles.
Anyway, here’s a sample of what you can create with MS freaking Bob. This is a screenshot from the letter writer program:
I don’t believe I have any other word processor at my disposal that will put fucking palm trees of adjustable size around the border.
And there’s actually a quiz game part of the interface that, if I remember right, would be mildly entertaining for a kid. In fact, if I had such a kid around that I wanted to mollify while I did grown up stuff, I might give him a netbook with MS Bob loaded on it. It would be hours of fun. Not much more than that though.
I guess MS Bob could also be fun if you like having your computer screen look like a colourful cluttered mess of crap and advertising that you don’t want and that hides most of the functionality from you and forces you to re-learn how to use your own computer because it’s moved everything way the fuck around and doesn’t respond consistently to input by the user.
If you really want such an experience, I have just the thing for you!
