By Alice Hill
RealTechNews

There was a time when everyone was trying to build a better GUI (Graphical User Interface) for the PC platform, including Microsoft. And on an oddly sunny day in Redmond back in 1995, I personally sat in on the demo of a strange but fascinating add-on to Windows 3.1 called: Microsoft Bob. The meeting was headed by a product manager named Melinda French who later went on to become Mrs. BillG, but the talk of that day was on her belief that using helpful cartoon characters and a comfortable “Home” interface to help the average Joe or Bob, navigate a computer was the future. Alas….

Meet Bob

After installing “Bob” the user is sent to a red front door with a knocker. The thing that personally cracked me up was when you clicked on the door knocker, a doorbell rang. I can’t remember if they fixed that by the final release. Anyway, here is more info on ill-fated GUI on this great site I found that covers the world of Bob.
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A few possible reasons that Bob flopped:

* Bob required a minimum of a 486 with 8 megs of ram, 30 megs of free disk space, and 256 color VGA. Many computers of the day did not meet these minimum requirements.
* It was too “cute” for the average PC users of the day.
* Most people at the time who wanted ease of use would just get a Macintosh.
* Bob was not useful enough to justify its initial sale price of almost $100.
* Windows 95, which was released later that year, had the new Windows Explorer user interface which wiped the floor with Bob.

And so Microsoft Bob disappeared in to obscurity.

There appear to be two releases of Bob. These screen shots are of version 1.00 which has a time stamp of 1/30/1995. Then there is a second release, version “1.00a” dated 8/14/95, which included some additional guides, rooms, and objects.
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More About Bob Here

Alice’s Note: The only survivor of the character concept was that annoying paper clip in Microsoft Office and he eventually bit the dust too. Anyone else remember Bob?