Microsoft Bob: Microsoft's biggest flop of the 1990s

FWIW I actually really enjoyed that VR Home concept, far more than any of the current ones. At the time that I had the headset that supported that and still ran windows I was enamored with the space and spent a lot of time in the loft space, the one at the top of the skyscraper.

I did as much of my computing in that space as possible, pulling up multiple desktop windows and floating applications and pinning them places. On one wall I had the Zune software with my whole music library, and my music played from that place, so I imported 3d models of speakers (I managed to actually find an end user use case for that default Windows user folder and I still as an admin and dev wonder why it's a default) and stuck them next to the app and they persisted. I'd drag discord around with me and I could even access the screen of my phone by bringing up Your Phone.

I found it really kind of nice to use, and I wish the space had been more capable. Able to take more object formats, able to handle more vertices, I wish I had been able to boot directly to the virtual environment and eschew the step of switching between desktop and virtual mode. It also visually paused basically every app and desktop you didn't specifically keep active, except for Zune--that would go into Mixview and look cool as hell on the wall.

I miss it, and I'm sad they killed it and I'm not aware of an experience like it for linux on an openish device atm.

And Jesus wept!

https://youtu.be/z4FGzE4endQ

I remember once buying a graphics card that included one of these virtual environments where files were on shelves, etc. Wish I could remember its name.

Well, as a kid, I loved it.

It was probably awful but I didn’t care at all it had extreme 90´s vibes. All of my games were in a space room or whatever I remember. I was 6 or 7 and I discovered computers. Everything was cool. Packard Bell Navigator was in everything so it was cool :)

Yes it’s nostalgia.

Version 1.0 of Packard bell navigator in that video reminds me of the Macintosh "at ease" software I used to see in schools.

Totally off topic, I'm reminded that a high school friend gave me an old Packard bell machine for free once, and I ran OpenBSD on it for years. I got some ISA NICs and used it as a firewall.

Ugh, Packard Bell. Being our first computer, we had no idea that Navigator program was pointless until months after. And I think it was another year before we realized it was capable of true color resolution (It shipped with 256 colors as the default).

The first computer that I bought (in 8th grade, after saving for a couple of years) had Packard Bell Navigator. It was a sort of full-screen program in Windows 95 that you'd use to launch other programs, although it could do a few other things in-app.

It was ... odd. I opened it once or twice and deleted it.

“Adult Password” vs the much more common modern “Admin Password” is excellent

if Microsoft Bob was too cartoony for you, you could also go with a cartoony puppy, or a cartoon wizard!

I worked with a software developer who LOVED that puppy - way more than I loved MOPy fish (rip)

Wait wait wait, Comic Sans was born in Microsoft Bob!? Way to bury the lead! That’s an incredible little origin story!

> This feels like an urban legend made up after the fact.

Raymond Chen of Microsoft has this to say about that:

"... [the person adding 30 megs of random crap] could have just called the CryptGenRandom function to generate 30 megabytes of cryptographically random bytes, but where's the fun in that? Instead, he dug through the archives and found a copy of Microsoft Bob. He took all the floppy disk images and combined them into one big file. The contents of the Microsoft Bob floppy disk images are not particularly random, so he decided to scramble up the data by encrypting it. When it came time to enter the encryption key, he just smashed his hand haphazardly across the keyboard and out came an encrypted copy of Microsoft Bob. That's what went into the unused space as ballast data on the Windows XP CD..."[0]

[0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/technet-...

> It would be way easier to just generate random bytes, and nobody could ever tell the difference.

Programmers love easter eggs.

Edit: sillywalk's comment proves my point.

Comic Sans was from Microsoft Comic Chat [1], which was a separate product from Bob.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Comic_Chat

It also gave us the world’s greatest example of poorly thought through security practices.

You can set a password on your Bob account. If you fail to enter the right password three times in a row, Microsoft Bob lets you reset the password, no further questions.

The funeral director at my father’s funeral used comic sans for everything.

A flop no but used hilariously for a things it shouldn’t be. One of the most divisive typefaces ever.

I like it.

It's a clickbait title.

If we were serious about biggest flops, we'd be talking about my beloved Lumia WP.