Finding an Easter Egg in Microsoft Bob

https://benstoneonline.com/posts/microsoft-bob-easter-egg/

by elvis70 • 5 years ago

176 64 5 years ago

bombcar3• 5 years ago

An interesting thing that we forget with Bob and Clippy is the people reviewing/commenting on it are almost by definition NOT the people it was aimed at. Having sold 58k copies, there must be some people who actually used it.

wombat-man• 5 years ago

as a kid I spent a lot of time customizing the house and sometimes playing the weird geography game in there. I think we had an irl one at school too.

It was kinda fun, even though it wasn't really a game.

eysquared• 5 years ago

It came pre-installed on my family's shiny new Gateway computer. As a kid I loved customizing my house and adding custom icons for things like games in my 'bedroom.'

It never replaced the actual desktop, but it was fun to go into my own 'house' on the family computer customized to my liking in the days before profiles and separate logins.

Jtsummers• 5 years ago

Exactly. I'm curious how many sales were sales and how many were part of a PC bundle with other MS software. This is how we had it as well, with a Gateway 2000 PC purchase in 1995 (and I similarly enjoyed customizing my house in it).

rthomas6• 5 years ago

I was also one of these kids. I even made a secret room under the rug where I put my games.

guessbest2• 5 years ago

It was aimed at computers with a VGA card when it was released sometime between 1993 and 1994, which wasn't a very large market when I was a teenager then. But at the Dallas Sidewalk Sale on the Third Saturday someone had a demo of this with their prebuilt computers from their small business always had a large crowd.

fooblat• 5 years ago

I was working in a large computer store in California when Bob came out. To my memory, I never sold a single copy. This is despite a large in-store promotion put on by Microsoft.

Talanes• 5 years ago

In 1995 I was five years old, and the computer my Grandparents had bought us came with Microsoft Bob, and it was the only way I used the computer for a while.

I also remember an encyclopedia program that was wrapped in a virtual spaceship interface. For a bit, I just thought that these sort of graphical interfaces were what computing was.

alberth3• 5 years ago

Some trivia ... Melinda French was the GM over Microsoft Bob. She later married Bill Gates and is now known as Melinda Gates.

wincy2• 5 years ago

If that had happened today Bill Gates would have had to step down as CEO and would have been disgraced for fraternizing with an underling.

alberth3• 5 years ago

IIRC, when she married Bill - she resigned from the company.

sp332• 5 years ago

Um... ok?

DoreenMichele• 5 years ago

Maybe we could view it is a case study in how to pull this off successfully instead of implying they did something wrong and actively spreading the current atmosphere of blight?

divbzero• 5 years ago

She is listed in FINANCE.MDB as one of “Rover’s Awesome All Stars”.

detritus3• 5 years ago

Modern versions of Access refuse to open databases that were created with old versions, so I dusted off an old copy of Office 97.

Goodness gracious, Microsoft - why?

alberth3• 5 years ago

Microsoft is notorious in the efforts they make to allow backward compatibility. But in this one case, they don't and are the villain? I can still run programs targeted at 16bit Microsoft Windows 3.x from 30 years ago.

Apple breaks background compatibility nearly every year on their products, yet they get a pass?

detritus3• 5 years ago

I'm not sure I implied that, and I've been a PC since '97.

This just seemed like a particularly pointless restriction. It's database. How hard can it be to support and convert?

blowski2• 5 years ago

I didn't see anyone giving Apple a pass, but yeah I'm OK with backwards compatiblity not being a thing for 20 year old desktop software.

tinus_hn2• 5 years ago

I’m pretty sure you can’t run 16 bit programs on 64 bit Windows.

You can easily emulate a 16 bit computer though.

simcop2387• 5 years ago

Not directly or natively, but WineVDM is a thing and will usualky let you run old 16bit programs while looking like it's nearly native

userbinator2• 5 years ago

Apple breaks background compatibility nearly every year on their products, yet they get a pass?

That's why those who value backwards compatibility don't choose Apple or Google, they choose Microsoft.

Unfortunately these days Microsoft seems to wish it were and is starting to act more like the former two, but the difference is still there.

banana_giraffe• 5 years ago

The Wikipedia article on Jet ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Jet_Database_Engine ) talks a bit about the backwards compat strategy.

This is case where they broke backwards compatibility. At the time, they had an upgrade strategy, though I wouldn't be surprised to learn the tools that handle the upgrade are no longer supported at this point.

My understanding from the outside is it was an attempt to bring Jet Red (the desktop database, what Access used) and Jet Blue (the server database, used by things like Exchange) closer to be compatible with each other on some level, along with making Jet Red less of a "toy" database.

yuhong• 5 years ago

Because ACER2X.DLL (for Jet 2.x databases which Bob likely used) was removed in Access 2010. (Trivia: reading form, reports, macros, modules etc from Access 2.x databases required another 16-bit program that MS stopped shipping with Access 2003)

Edit: Actually, this also reminds me that I believe a compatibility pack was needed to use Access 2.x databases in VB3 which only supported Access 1.1 databases by default!

29athrowaway• 5 years ago

There are some Microsoft Bob easter eggs in other Microsoft products.

The nerd emote from MSN Messenger comes from MS Bob. The dog is an assistant in MS Office. There might be more too.

msarnoff• 5 years ago

One of the credited artists, Leslie Patricelli, is now a children's book author/illustrator.

tuckerpo• 5 years ago

No Dave Plummer in contributors, odd

Zenst4• 5 years ago

No but he did use it as padding for CDROM distro of Windows so that the discs had unique ID's

The Secret history of Microsoft BOB https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXHu9OmLd8Y

miohtama• 5 years ago

This was awesome video. Bob the blob. How to make sure crypto is correct. A mathematician who could not take calls after 5pm.

LocalH• 5 years ago

That means that teeeechnically, this easter egg exists on every such shipped copy of Windows XP

userbinator2• 5 years ago

Sadly, that might be a bit of a joke/urban legend based on the fact that this is the only evidence I've found of anyone actually attempting to verify it:

https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/12476/did-the-w...

It mentions some interesting logic around OEMBIOS.BIN, which the OP or anyone else curious might want to investigate.

ehnto• 5 years ago

That's a remarkable number of Davids in the Developers list. Was the hiring manager named David by any chance?

dclowd9901• 5 years ago

One of the commenters on the article remarks that there are more "Davids" on the team than women.

acheron2• 5 years ago

These are the Daves I know. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVzDIE0mr6A

prox• 5 years ago

They’re all hired by HALL

ac29• 5 years ago

Names from the Bible (Adam, Michael, Paul, Peter, Matthew, David, etc) were and to some degree still are quite common among Americans.

moioci• 5 years ago

Isn't the most lasting legacy of MS Bob the Comic Sans font?

laumars• 5 years ago

No. Bob predates Comic Sans by a year or two.

Comic Sans was originally released as part of Microsoft Plus, and then later used in Comic Chat (their take on IRC). Comic Chat is an interesting enough topic to warrant its own discussion though.

wcfields• 5 years ago

One quirky hack that no one asked for that I figured out in 1997: You can take the assistant files Rover, Skuz, Shelly, etc... and copy them into MS Office's assistant directory to get Bob assistants in Office!

guessbest2• 5 years ago

Are their any 'toy office' apps for kids these days? Something between Bob and Outlook?

Finding an Easter Egg in Microsoft Bob

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