The Microsoft Bob Experience - Was It Really THAT Bad

Yeah , Microsoft Bob , that name always confused me who calls their software Bob mid nineties , 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 clipping and comic Sans quite the legacy if true .

And now it's finally time to find out .

Welcome to the Microsoft Bob experience on L G R .

First off .

Big thanks to Jason and Robert for sending several of the items you'll be seeing in this video .

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 hardworking , easy going software everyone will use even underlined it for good measure .

Bally Microsoft were so sure this was going to be a hit that they planned their own Bob ecosystem with its own software .

Given 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 than having Microsoft Bob as the main requirement .

And they even published a book authored by Barbara Rally 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 paperwork , like tech support cards and product license agreements and even a sheet of Bob stickers .

Hm .

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 .

Oh , 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 .

All right .

Well , enough of this stuff , let's get Bob installed with Microsoft Windows and I'm going to 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 with a standard application installation process .

You just put in your name and install away once it's done , you just open it like any other application because that's really what it is a piece of software you install the 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 or 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 .

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 through 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 and next and next and yeah , that's not a very enjoyable interactive tutorial .

What's different from this and Emanuel 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 , 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 can 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 .

They 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 .

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 nineties , 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 .

I mean , you look at all the chairs , Max's 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 .

Uh , 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 or B the planet Rover , the rover dog .

And , yeah , that is , by the way , the same rover that is in Windows X P S search function .

Microsoft held on to some of these guys for a long time .

Anyway , you also got Ruby the pirate parrot scuzz , the rabbit rat .

He's pretty much my favorite one .

He's just a sarcastic jerk .

Not very helpful at all .

He's just like , ah , 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 is , 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 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 darned 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 .

More useful program that it came with was Bob email .

This not only let you have an at bob dot 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 MC I 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 helped 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 stationary 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 our companies and services and magazines and politicians and all sorts of people .

So if you want 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 , just sort of floats around and you can pop it .

That's the 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 what not 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 Geo Safari .

Yes .

Geo Friggin Safari , a very classic educational quiz game .

And these were not only those physical geo safari things that you saw on the board game and toy sections back in the day , but there was also Geo safari for Bob right here .

I'm sure I'll be talking about other geo safari 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 is as possible and get the most points as you can .

And 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 will 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 comes with is this booklet right here .

The paper catalog , just a bunch of stationary and papers and cards and things that you can print things on using this great greetings program and this comes on to 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 nineties .

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 that's it .

I guess you 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 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 shelves , 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 46 C P U 32 megs of hard disk space and eight megabytes of specs that put it out of reach of a good number of families who might have actually wanted a program like Bob .

Nonetheless , Bob ended up being included with computers from manufacturers like Gateway Micro Packard Bell and N E C , which is seemingly how most people got it considering it's abysmal retail sales .

But despite all its problems and well deserved criticisms .

Bob can't quite be blamed for two things .

Sands and clipping .

Yeah .

Don't forget I was going to bring those up and here it is .

Well , it's true that Comic Sands was developed with Microsoft Bob in mind .

The type face 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 assistant look strange in times .

New Roman Comic Sands 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 , Clie does not appear anywhere in Bob either .

That didn't happen until office 97 where Microsoft introduced Bob inspired virtual assistance in applications like Microsoft word .

Oh , and he's not called clipping either .

His name is clip it , which I didn't realize until making this video .

I don't know when we all started calling him clipping instead of clip it .

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 100 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 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 L G R 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 .