When Microsoft Bob officially hit store shelves on March 31st, 1995, it wasn’t synonymous with “tech-product flop of monumental proportions.” Even pundits who weren’t so sure about it tended to buy into the notion that it was a sneak peek at where interfaces were going. And almost nobody would have guessed that Microsoft would kill it a year later.
Given that Bob was estimated to have sold only a measly 58,000 copies during its brief life, many people who mock it to this day never actually used it. Here’s a walkthrough of some of its major features–take a look and judge for yourself. And don’t miss our history of Bob and insider’s look at Bob, Clippy, and friends by a Microsoft veteran.
(Note: I ran Bob on Windows XP to create these screenshots. If you’ve got to see Bob for yourself, finding it, installing it, and troubleshooting it isn’t too hard…)
What’s the most efficient way to deride a technology product as a stinker and/or a flop? Easy: Compare it to Microsoft Bob. Bring up the infamous Windows 3.1 front-end for computing newbies–officially released fifteen years ago this week, on March 31st, 1995–and you need say no more. Everything from 
After I managed the 
Remember the nifty tech-company reference in Robert Zemeckis’s 1994 blockbuster 
Yesterday I paid a long-overdue visit to one of the Bay Area’s most amazing geek destinations–the Weird Stuff Warehouse, which salvages the hardware and software that Silicon Valley has lost interest in. The place has been in business for a quarter century and throngs of shoppers were roaming the aisles during my expedition. And it was bursting at the seams with shrinkwrapped software for defunct platforms, obsolete gadgets, components and cables of every imaginable type, and much, much more.
to admit this, but I’ve lived in the Bay Area for almost eight years without paying a single visit to one of its most legendary temples, Sunnyvale’s 
You saved and you saved until you could finally buy that shiny new $1000 gadget that promised you everything under the stars. When it came time to plug it in, you found your joy being subsumed by abject horror. Your stomach plunged deep into your gut and you (yes, mortal non-designer you) recognized a fundamental flaw in your flashy gizmo so obvious that it made you want to pick up the device and smash it over the designer’s head.
I spent a couple of my formative years as a tech journalist working at 
Back in the 1980s, if you wanted to stay particularly up-to-date on the PC business, you read a newsweekly–and there was a high chance that the newsweekly you read was IDG’s InfoWorld. Among the most venerable and successful computing publications–it started in 1978 and