BentUser - Microsoft Bob Review

Have some free time? Relive the horror that was Microsoft Bob.

I recall Microsoft Bob (I can't call it BOB, because that's exclusively reserved for use by David Lynch), and like most people, I just didn't get it. I think the objective of the Bob project was to cover the figurative last mile of computer literacy. "Grandma doesn't know DOS, but she'll be more likely to use a computer to check her mail if it involves her clicking something actually looks like a letterbox. Brilliant!" The point was that Bob was an attempt to map the things Windows was capable of doing with real-life pictures: entering the program was done by entering a door, for example.

There was, of course, no market for Bob. The people who would benefit from it the most didn't own computers and certainly didn't know anything about HCI. What Bob ultimately became was a cute but useless distraction: a digital dollhouse you could redesign and redecorate to your heart's content.

In a sense, Microsoft Bob was The Sims 0.1 alpha. You could change its interior layout however you wanted and could pretty much make it a tiny, perfunctory home away from home, "home" being your actual computer desktop. My sister loved Microsoft Bob for exactly this reason. She didn't have mail. She didn't check her calendar. She didn't use her computer for anything whatsoever. She'd just open Bob and thrill about reorganizing its pieces over and over again. "I think I'll put the calendar on that wall. No, I don't like that clock. I want a different-looking clock. Whee!" This could go on for days.

Microsoft Bob never aided her productivity because she didn't have anything productive to do, but as a kind of demented video game, Bob was a top notch life sim.