So, we have HP on stage, brother, what a name, what a name brother, okay, so we will talk
about something called popo, right, so the stage is yours, yeah, you're
going to regret having uploaded already, I'm afraid, but what is this talk about?
This is about Microsoft Bob and implementing an application for this fantastic platform
from about 1994, so who am I?
My name is Hapay from Bram, I'm a board member of the Gido Foundation, I have a consulting
company called pre-hanciled sales and I like old computers, sometimes also how new computers
but that's more or more rare lately.
So, what is it to talk about, well, first of all, why are we here talking about a project
from Microsoft from 1994 that most of you have never heard about?
It also occurred to me that when I was making this talk, the 1994 is long enough ago that there
will be people in this audience that wasn't a window-life then and have kids now just
for all of you all to think about for a second, you're welcome, so what are we talking
about?
What we're going to nerd out a little bit about some old computer stuff and is there
anything we can learn from this project?
So how did we get there?
Why am I talking about this, why are you well forced to listen to this here now?
I was browsing the internet that you do and I came across this forum post, I don't exactly
know why or how I came across it but sometimes universe gives.
And this was the thing that I got, hello, I have a friend here who still uses old computer
running Windows 95.
He said that the only thing uses for this letter using Microsoft Bob Latter writer.
This post was from 2010, so this is a person that apparently used the Windows 90.
Oh, there we go again.
So apparently the genes friend used Windows 95 computer for about 15 years and you
use the Microsoft Bob Latter writer to write their toes in.
So there's many questions that is raised, so what is Microsoft Bob?
What is Microsoft Bob Latter writer?
Well, first of all, what is Microsoft Bob?
We can quickly look on Wikipedia and find out that Microsoft Bob was a product from Microsoft
from about 1994, 1995.
That's right, 1995, this came out in the same year that Windows 95 came out with also turns
out why you might never have heard of this thing.
So SD, previous Wikipedia page says what it said, it was to replace program manager.
And again, as I was writing this talk, I realized in 1994, quite a long time ago, so some
of you might not know, this is program manager, this is what Windows 3, with some of
you might never see an either I guess, looked like, so if I can, then Windows, etc.
What was this about showing a house?
Well, this is what Microsoft Bob computer interface looks like.
The idea was that this was, in fact, instead of a desktop, this is what you got.
So you got a friendly room with a nice dog in the corner showing things happening.
For instance, this is a room that has, this is the public mouse house, and this is the public
study, and this is Microsoft Bob letter writer, the project that the genes friend apparently
spent 15 years writing all their correspondences in.
So despite all of this, I'm really not here to make fun of Microsoft Bob,
to a certain extent is because it does it all itself already, right?
There's nothing I can say that is funny or just looking at the screenshot of this thing.
So I'm not going to try, but there is a sort of earnestness to this whole thing that I
find absolutely irresistible. Like Microsoft spent years building this thing, spend countless
like many hours human lives with our spends building this thing, and then I've sold it in stores
for about six months, then Windows 95 came out, and all of this was for nothing.
So are there good things about this thing, and I really, I honestly think there are.
So if you look at this screenshot that we're here, you'll notice that, for instance, this
being grows is an item that you can click on. If you click on it, you can say change it,
and then you can resize it, and it's all like pixel-verfic. Like this is running in the screenshot
is from a doesbox running in 124768, for instance. It's also as a wild amount of integration
for 1994. It can do things that you really would not expect your computer to do in 1994.
For instance, there's an address book. I can add a contact for false them. I can give it a
birthday, and then when I go to my calendar application, it'll know that February 5th is the
birthday of false them. I can go to the mail application and send an email to false them by adding
it to my address book that's a separate application. Of course, right now, this is all stuff we
expect, right? But your computer from 1995 running Windows 3.1, you really wouldn't expect most of
this. You barely would expect the thing to work at all. It's also super-walk. For everyone,
it was like concerns about like the modern, vote-staff. Microsoft Bob in 1995 allowed you to not
have a gender. It's also super-secure. Like you guys had best works on stuff.
It's also surprisingly fun, and this is a thing that I genuinely think is kind of missing
from modern computing. Like everything is like, no, KDE, Windows. It's all, it's all become a tool,
right? There's very little fun. What you see here is me logging in with a false them user who has a
birthday on January 31st, as in today. You noticed that you log in, and the dog will tell you,
hey, this is for you, open it. This is just something that your computer just does. If you open it,
what happens? This is just your desktop now, by the way, these are items. You can move it around.
You can move the box around. You can click on the balloons and pop them. It's really cool.
Your computer doesn't do this anymore. You can really try to delight you anymore. Your computer
now just tries to not be visible for the most part. That's also some bad things. Once you have
your giant vase, then well, that's just the size of the vase now. And if you don't like it,
I just have to move it, make it smaller again. You want to make it exactly as big as it was?
Hope you remember. Also, this is all shared, right? You can have multiple users using these same
rooms. So if somebody decides to put like a giant flower in the middle, now that flowers
just there for everyone in the house. Also, what the fuck is this? What is the one in my
looking at? What is this supposed to be? And let's see, I'm going to try to do something slightly
brave. This is the actual software running. So this is a male client, but
what is this trying to convey? The house is relatively straightforward. We know what a house
looks like roughly. I hope this is going to go through. Sorry. That was, oh, it's receiving.
So what is this thing? In the sense of Microsoft Bob clearly tries to make your computer look
like things, but this is like an letter which we can open. What is this thing that my
male is showing up on? Well, this is one of these. You know, this thing that everyone has in their house,
now it's very easy, very easy to use, very intuitive. One more. What does shit is this?
It's actually not a bad graphic, but once the last time you've actually held one of these,
I believe that's probably people in Israel who literally never seen one before. You're welcome.
Also, well, it doesn't exactly have blue screens, application errors, general protection,
fault, and you spread that VBX is going to be part of your daily life if you use Bob a lot.
Might be because of those box, but you might not be surprised to hear that I have a laptop running
exclusively Microsoft Bob and it also does it. But that comes help, but love this thing. It is
quirky and weird and they try to make computers accessible to people and failed
spectacularly, but earnestly. So, how what was suffered of them for this thing actually? Like,
well, nobody really knows exactly because of the four months that this was on the stores.
There was not any third-party app developed, nor did Microsoft have actually released an SDK.
However, I was able with G-Hydra to figure out that there's some flag you can set in wind.ini.
Yes, that is really the only way to do it. And with unlocks the virtual
visual basic controls, which then allows you to open these controls of visual basic. And this is
basically what the interface, in visual basic loops like when you're building a Microsoft Bob application.
It's interesting because almost everything in Microsoft Bob is written a visual basic free.
It includes the whole word processor and email clients, all entirely visual basic, but not the
checkbook application in the calendar. I don't know why. What makes the Microsoft Bob application
Microsoft Bob application? Well, first of all, there's a podium in the bottom right. This is
actually an integral part of the app experience because there is no title bar or anything.
The podium actually takes the place of what on other systems is the title bar. So it has the
only menu that exists in a Bob application, which is the exit button. The new of the guide,
which is managed by the podium and has to stay on the podium, it's very sad. And that is really
all. So you see that in the corner there, you see the room, like the behind it, that is all spoken
mirrors. It literally takes a screenshot right before starting up and there's puts it on the background.
So, but in the background, Microsoft Bob actually uses state-of-the-art features of 1994,
which is internally everything you see is an MSGET databases. All of the surfaces are exposed
via calm object. All of the shared components, the podium, the guide, or VBX components,
with at the time, were supposed to be the modern way of componentizing an application.
The mail stores are in PST, with some of you might remember being. So these are actually the same
mail format that Microsoft Outlook still uses today to store emails. And the mail client interfaces
mapping, which means that the DLL that interfaces the Microsoft Bob mail client to the mail backend,
is the same interface that Microsoft Outlook uses today to talk to Office 365.
So, they really did try to make something good. Again, they failed, but they really did try.
And of course, this thing has to run in 16-bit Windows LAN, because VBX didn't make an
little Windows 95, almost none of the core technologies did. There's still some questionable choices,
like while it looks like each app runs in the room. As I pointed that earlier,
it's really is all smoke and mirrors. The podium manages the guide for some reason. There are two
separate objects, but if you put the guide somewhere else on the screen, it just stops working.
No, I still don't know why, and I spent a embarrassing amount of time trying to figure out why.
And I think this is not necessarily really a Microsoft Bob specific problem, but there's a lot
of boilerplate code, both in visual basic, as well as in C++, that you just have to have in your
application. But at the time, people just love to do that. I don't know how many of you ever had
the milled fortune of trying to write a 16-bit NFC application. But you start by wizard. We
answer a bunch of questions, which will then generate literally hundreds of lines of codes for you.
The two can't really touch, and you can, but you get to keep all the pieces.
So how does software development work, if most of it is in visual basic? Well, C++ is possible,
the only way to write VBX stuff isn't C++. So there is a APIs for that, but because they use VBX
controls, we use visual basic controls, that means that every C++ has to be using MFC.
MFC stands for Microsoft Foundation classes, right away, for the young whippersnapper, and the
audience, and everything has come. So what does that look like? Well, instantiating the podium
in C++ looks like this, and the only thing that this does is get to the little thing in the corner.
Then in order to start an application, this is more or less the minimum amount of code you need
to do anything at all, and this won't actually run like this. You also notice the work you told PIA
everywhere, that was the actual internal name for Microsoft Bob. It's, it's codes itself,
Utopia. So how did I figure this out? Well originally, like I said, there was like two
native applications, checkbook.exe, which I ran through Geahitrafero very long time, trying to figure
out all of these polls into Utopia, the DLL. But then after months of working, there's somebody
just randomly dumped like the copy of part of the realistic A-Online. There's still a lot of missing
pieces from that, but together with that, with all of the stuff that I had worked out beforehand,
I was actually able to make something work. So let's see if the demo gods will be kind to me today.
I have multiple dustboxes running my apologies.
Wait, who doesn't? All right, so this is the application starting that you saw before,
Bob Hela World made by me.
Fantastic.
Well, that is the real experience that you got there.
And it's a quick, so just to show you that this is also not this is the actual
notebook application of the visual basic one that I run through, visual basic decompiler,
and spent more time than I would like to admit fixing up. But you'll see that this visual
basic code shoots theoretically. There you go. Actually, run like,
got them. All right, moving very swiftly along.
So how did Gene's plight end? Well, Gene managed to rescue the documents off her friend,
but it was puzzled by the fact that Bob would only have these number files, and she didn't understand
why. And I didn't understand why either. So that's, that is not a dust file name, but you don't
get to pick a dust file name whenever you make a new document in Microsoft Bob.
And when you open documents, you don't get to see a list of files, you get to see a list of the
documents you made. And it will also notice this little thing on the bottom there,
share it with others, or keep it private. That's not a thing that Windows 3 can do.
Windows 95 can barely do this. Well, the trick is that indeed on your file system,
in the folder where the right application itself lives, that letter is in fact just called 77wtp.
So Bob stores the real file, the Bob file names in a database. One of these MSGET databases that
everything is stored on, and the user never actually sees any real files. In the rare cases where
Bob will let you pick a file outside of itself, it actually calls it a dust file.
So, and Gene was not able to figure this out. Would you, but can you figure it out today,
where you've met a lot of your friends and family is now? I don't actually think that Bob
did this on purpose. I think they were like, this is kind of my thesis about this whole thing.
They actually, I think, were trying to do something good for a change. I mean, this is the Microsoft
of the 1995, right? Not just today. They probably still write them. And it's still managed to
be extremely careful because of this weird database thing. And this is something I can't reliably
demo, obviously. But these MSGET databases also had a tendency to just blow up. Like, if you
turn your computer off at the wrong time, they would just completely corrupt, which is fun.
But modern software as a service actually does this on purpose, right? There's plenty of
services where you can export your data, but only a version of it that is only short of what you
actually put in. And I realize I'm preaching to the choir a little bit. But I think that stuff
like this still happens today and people pick Bob because it was supposed to be user-friendly.
I mean, for the four months that it was available on people got to pick it. And I didn't realize
that this is what they were doing. And I think we're still doing this today. And I think we're
still letting our friends and families do this today. So I want to thank you. And I want to open
the room for some questions. I think there's only a couple of minutes. If you want to play with Bob,
I put a version online. It has works in your web browser. I hacked the docs box a little bit so you
can press the print button and you can get all of your beautiful documents in Chris Postcript,
writing your browser. I have a Patreon. There's currently no paid stairs, but you can sign out for free.
If you want to hire me to do weird tech shit, that's my business. And tomorrow I'm going to talk
about the milk line you saw working. And follow me on Mr. Dom.
There's apparently a time for one question.
Yes? Why? Well, it is a good question. And I said that would
answer it, but I didn't really, I guess. The real, I mean, the real answer is because I have
severe ADHD and I picked and I saw that post by cheating exactly the wrong time. That is the real
answer I guess. Thank you very much. You can, if you have more questions.