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Comment by GeekyBear | Hacker News Reader

I'd have to say that the General Magic user interface (Magic Cap) was much more similar to the user interface in Microsoft Bob than an iPhone.

>Microsoft Bob presented screens showing a "house", with "rooms" that the user could go to containing familiar objects corresponding to computer applications—for instance, a desk with pen and paper, a checkbook, and other items. In this case, clicking on the pen and paper would open the word processor.

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

Here's a short overview of a device running Magic Cap and it's user interface for comparison.

https://www.microsoft.com/buxtoncollection/detail.aspx?id=37

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Funny; Home Assistant [2], one of the top projects on github, just added a feature that allows people to build out really nice UI's for their home automation systems. Some of them [1] look a heck of a lot like MS Bob, but this time you can actually flip your actual lights on and off! It was just ahead of its time.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/homeassistant/comments/8wdscs/lovel...

[2] https://www.home-assistant.io/

Reminds me of Don Norman's kinda crazy light switches in his house, described in "The Design of Everyday Things":

> FIGURE 4.5. A Natural Mapping of Light Switches to Lights. This is how I mapped five switches to the lights in my living room. I placed small toggle switches that fit onto a plan of the home’s living room, balcony, and hall, with each switch placed where the light was located. The X by the center switch indicates where this panel was located. The surface was tilted to make it easier to relate it to the horizontal arrangement of the lights, and the slope provided a natural anti-affordance, preventing people from putting coffee cups and drink containers on the controls.

I was an OS/2 guy at the time of Bob, so I never used it. But what I see reminds me of a modern upgrade of Commodore’s 1983 Magic Desk.

http://toastytech.com/guis/magdesk.html

"MOVE JOY STICK TO FORMAT DISK"

That seems...stressful. I'd hate to accidentally move it while trying to press the fire button and delete all the stuff on my disk.

Its also interesting to see the desktop metaphor work on such weak equipment, at least outside of a lab. I think this is also further evidence that GUIs just couldnt really work well with such low resolution.

Two years later you had GEOS which looks like something I could tolerate today:

http://toastytech.com/guis/c64g.html

I know a retired Microsoft employee that literally quit on day one after being assigned to the Bob project because it was so incredibly stupid. He was reassigned after that.

It's always really cool seeing designs like this, just a reminder that nobody really had any idea what they were doing when building these UIs back then since it was totally unexplored territory

If anything, they had a better idea what they were doing than people do now. Windows 95 is a case study in good design. They got there by testing it and iterating on it a ton. https://socket3.wordpress.com/2018/02/03/designing-windows-9...

This. We’ve gone backwards in informed usability.

In my first software job in 1997, the UI department employed an industrial designer, a graphic designer and a researcher with a masters in cognition science. The company had a usability lab where the UI was tested under controlled conditions.

Today companies have a graphic designer who calls themselves a “UX expert” and draws pictures of interfaces in Sketch.

Win95 and Win2k where in my opinion the high water mark of Windows UI, everything since has mostly been different or worse.

Though with touchscreens I can see why that pattern would have dated badly.

That said, 16 year old me would have zero issues with using Cinnamon how I have it setup 22 years later.

Well after he stopped pointing at the screen in amazement and trying to get his head around a laptop with 4x2.8GHz cores and 8 threads.

Hell he’d even recognise a thinkpad in 2018 mostly because 16yo me really wanted one.

Win 2k really was sharp. Xp eventually was able to get close but by then it was replaced by Vista, and I switched to Mac.

> nobody really had any idea what they were doing when building these UIs back then

We evolved to flat design with minimal user cues and abstract icons lacking any text labels sitting inside a giant Javascript blob that breaks the browser's back button and scroll bars and is a 20mb download. Yay?

It was common trope in the early days of UX to use real-world analogues to model your interactions. It was believed this would help with adoption because it would seem familiar.

Finally!!! I always remembered Microsoft Bob from my childhood, but was never able to find it back in the internet since I didn't know how it was called

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