Microsoft Bob Taking Up Space (2008) | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft Bob Taking Up Space (2008)

technet.microsoft.com

94 pointsdaledavies29 comments

The Microsoft Bob code lived also on in Office 97, 2002, 2002(XP) in the annoying Office Agent and Windows XP (in Windows desktop search, and WinXP setup second stage welcome screen).

Bill Gates wife Melinda was responsible for the Microsoft Bob (marketing, management level): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Bob

Related products (predecessors) were Microsoft Creative Writer and Microsoft Fine Artist (both for kids):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fine_Artist

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_Writer

Search on Google/Youtube for better picture/videos - both sister programs are very similar to Microsoft Bob, the have navigation screens and cartoon characters that help you.

> in the annoying Office Agent

Clippy is interesting because original plans would have made clippy useful, but some decisions ended up hobbling it.

http://robotzeitgeist.com/tag/bayesian-inference-engine

> No persistent user profiles.

> No reasoning about user competence, i.e., novice versus experienced user

> Small event queue with emphasis only on the most recent interactions of the user with the software interface (this means the engine was trying to guess the values of many variables using very little data.)

> Separation between user interface events and word-based queries; for word-based queries the engine ignored any context and user actions.

> Last and possibly most important and I quote from the paper, “The automated facility of providing assistance based on the likelihood that a user may need assistance or on the expected utility of such autonomous action was not employed.” Instead, “The Office team has employed a relatively simple rule-based system on top of the Bayesian query analysis system to bring the agent to the foreground with a variety of tips.” This is why Clippy kept popping up all the time. It was not using the mathematically correct engine that the researchers had designed. It was driven by some rule-based system that one or more of the developers from the product team thought was a reasonable substitute.

What it "should have been" sounds awfully like what Siri/Google Now/Cortana is today.

Microsoft has a real ability to be ahead of the game but still end up chasing :)

Windows XP CD, there was still about 30 megabytes of storage capacity remaining.

Somebody decided to fill that extra capacity on the CD with dummy data and to have the Windows Setup program verify that the dummy data was still there.

Really? This feels like a Microsoft urban legend. I'm not convinced because I have an original ISO image of the first release of Windows XP Pro and it is (~500MB) much smaller than the size of even the smallest regular CD. It works, I've used it for many installs.

Edit: in fact only the i386 folder on the CD, which is < 500MB, is needed to install XP so if there was a hidden copy of Bob in there, it certainly doesn't fit the "30MB remaining" nor are there any files in there which are of that size with the exception of the ~75MB driver.cab; the latter contains only device drivers and the biggest one, te_protu.qm, appears to be ISDN modem firmware.

Also, Windows XP was released on October 25, 2001. Broadband wasn't pervasive at that point, but it was definitely available to many people, and and extra 30 MB wouldn't have slowed many people down.

I love Raymond--he's got an erudite knowledge of Windows lore. The fellow delivers such good Microsoft standup that you can almost imagine the deadpans as he does them. Despite the constant head shaking directed at Microsoft, you can't help but laugh at how things are. Nonetheless, Raymond has rescued me many times when looking for the Windows equivalent of doing something.

Here's one of Raymond's Win32 API write ups/hacks for enumerating threads in a process:

"The tool helper library is sort of the black sheep of Win32. It grew out of the 16-bit TOOLHELP library, which provided services for system debugging tools to do things like take stack traces and enumerate all the memory in the system. The original incarnation of Win32 didn't incorporate it; it wasn't until Windows 95 that a 32-bit version of the tool helper library sort of got bolted onto the side of Win32."

"That's what happens when you're the black sheep of the Win32 API."

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2006/02/23/53785...

You haven't really lived till you've installed and used Bob on a computer.

Ultimately Microsoft Bob gave us Comic Sans. That Dank Meme we can all be thankful for.

Hey I thought it was Comic Chat that gave us Comic Sans … now that was fun.

http://venturebeat.com/2015/10/20/20-years-ago-i-created-the...

> As things transpired, Comic Sans didn’t actually make it into Microsoft Bob — but it did make it into 3D Movie Maker, which was similar to Microsoft Bob insofar as you had cartoon characters you could move around and do things with. The font then made it into Microsoft Comic Chat, which was similar to AOL chat, in that you could type messages to others on the Internet.

A bunch of people make different interfaces to HN. A Comic Chat interface would be fun, although not practical.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Comic_Chat

So what is closer to Bob: that encrypted file or an empty file? On the one hand, the encrypted file is only a couple of keystrokes away from creating Bob. But there is no known process to find the right keystrokes. The empty file needs a lot more keystrokes to create Bob (rewriting it from scratch), but there is a known process for doing it.

Edit: Kids, I'll just assume whoever downvotes me doesn't like Computer Science very much. That's OK, but what is with the intolerance?

User name relevant.

What do you mean?

(I didn't downvote you)

Assuming the OP is telling the truth and the password was just someone mashing the keys: it'd make a nice project for someone to try to see if it's vulnerable to cryptanalysis.

Windows XP was released around 2001. MS have had a few cryptographic errors.

That adds another twist :-) I just thought it would be amusing to think about different metrics and human perception. In the metric of keystrokes needed the encrypted file is closer to Bob, whereas in the metric of time needed the empty file might be closer. Human perception intuitively thinks the encrypted file is closer, but it might be wrong.

The entropy of Bob given the encrypted file is less than the entropy of Bob given an empty file. So Bob is closer to the encrypted file.

You mean if you have the file you need less information to retrieve Bob than if you don't have the file? That's certainly a valid way of looking at it.

I vote for the encrypted file being closer. Yes, there is a known process for going from an empty file to something like Bob, but you'll never reproduce it 100% exactly.

Plus, the encryption they used probably sucks.

It depends entirely on how you define "closer" (so you have to define distance). It's hamming distance should be about equivalent, if you assume Microsoft Bob contains about 50% bits set to one. Altough I have no idea if that assumption is valid for a typical Win32 binary.

Microsoft Blob

Does anyone want a shrinkwrapped, but slightly mushed copy of Bob? All it will cost you is a SASE...

If you're serious, I'll take you up on that! Hit me up at luma at svideo dot org

I hope this item met your expectations :-)

Isn't Dockercraft the same idea under MS Bob? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10584956

Why do I need to sign in to my Microsoft account to view this page?

That's interesting. I didn't.

Well, maybe this will be useful to someone https://archive.is/ZKgP

Or this: http://www.readability.com/m?url=https://technet.microsoft.c...

(minus all the ads)

I'd love to know too! I've noticed this happening sometimes when I follow MSDN or MS discussion forum links from Google.

Pretty sure it is because you have a cookie set that tells them you do have an acccount, so they prompt you for login.

If you click the link in a private window, I almost guarantee it wont prompt for login.

Quite annoying and it can add significant load time to pages even if you are signed in.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com