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Comment by pradn | Hacker News Reader

The windows button looks more like a flag than a window, nothing to do with starting anything!

The "Start" button was never really about starting things in the first place. After all, clicking "Start" was the first step to shutting down your computer! Perfectly intuitive...

Now it doesn't even say "Start" on it, and yet they persist in calling it the "Start menu".

I think the intent of the name was for the millions of new computer users at the time to think 'start here' when their computer booted up. And besides, if they didn't call it Start their Windows 95 ad blitz with Rolling Stones music would have made no sense at all! (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chTftktWmto)

If I remember correctly, the very first time you ran Windows 95 a little animated text box saying "<-- Click Here!" would fly across the taskbar to draw you to it. Coming from Windows 3.11 with Program Manager, it was initially a little confusing. Where was everything?

Yup, a little red airplane animation with a light yellow banner, on the taskbar, if I remember correctly. Didn't see it on all installations, though. Is it a specific version?

Just because you could Shut down thru Start-menu doesn't mean it was not meant to start things. That definitely has always been it's purpose.

> The "Start" button was never really about starting things in the first place.

What did you find when you opened the Start menu (https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/d/d3/Windows_95_St...)? Programs (click on one to start the program), Documents (click to start a program handling the file), Settings (click to start a Control Panel applet), Find (click to start a find dialog), Help (click to start the help viewer), Run (click to start an executable by name), ...

> After all, clicking "Start" was the first step to shutting down your computer!

You are, after all, starting the shutdown procedure.

Yes, every verb can be prefixed by "start". There's no functionality that could not be squeezed into your explanatory framework. But personally I think it's a real stretch to say that, say, viewing your collection of documents is "starting" anything (and starting the shutdown procedure is still bordering on obtuse).

No, the point of the Start menu was to provide a root node to a navigable hierarchy of all of Window's available functionality. Calling it "Start" makes sense from the perspective of the act of navigation - it is the user's "start point". While logical, I think this metaphor was subverted in many ways even when it was new; the hierarchy afforded by the Start menu was neither particularly well structured nor even the easiest way to access much of its functionality (it seemed to compete with "My Computer" for the title of "blessed root node").

Nowadays it seems that it is not even possible to navigate to all Windows functionality through the "Start menu".

This reminds me of the best "feature" that windows 95 had to me as a kid. If you clicked the start menu, then hit alt + -, you'd get the standard menu for playing with a window. Minimize, Maximize, Move (greyed out), and a few others. Importantly though was that Close was an option. Clicking it would remove the start button. This lead to lots of fun playing with computers in stores at the time, closing the start buttons on them all.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20120213-00/?p=83...

This was before the advent of "windows keyboards" and the menu key on them.

EDIT changed link to a better one

move worked to begin with, that was even more fun

they fixed it some way through Win98 I thought...

I never stumbled into that one. What I do remember from Windows 95b through 7 is if the keyboard focus was on the taskbar and you pressed Alt+F4, it brought up the Shutdown/Restart/Logoff dialog. That made it possible to cleanly shutdown the computer blindly from the keyboard. Win,Esc,Alt+F4,R,Enter

It's Win+X, U, U now.

You can still do pretty much the same thing. Win+D, Alt+F4.

That's still a thing, the focus just needs to be on the desktop!

Both the Desktop and the taskbar belong to Explorer and trying to close that is what triggers that dialog. Both still work in Windows 10.

> After all, clicking "Start" was the first step to shutting down your computer! Perfectly intuitive...

Ah yes, because the competition's UI of having you click on an icon of a literal piece of fruit to shutdown the computer makes more sense!

You can of course push the power button and Windows will go ahead and gracefully shut down, been that way since at least XP, if not 98 on computers that supported it!

Shutting down become a rather destructive option, putting it as a first level item on the task bar would lead to accidental clicks. Putting it as a first level menu item on the most prominent UI feature of the entire OS seems like a decent alternative!

> Now it doesn't even say "Start" on it, and yet they persist in calling it the "Start menu".

Eh, and we still say we save stuff to "disk". Never mind that it probably isn't even remotely disk shaped.

If I am writing instructions for a website, should I tell people to tap or click on things?

The pantomime for talking on the telephone is to stick thumb and pinky finger out to make it look like a device that a lot of people under 20 have possibly never even seen.

Starting the shutdown process is hardly the worst English faux pas the technology industry has made!

"Start" does not refer to starting things, it refers to the first button you need to click to make the computer do things, i.e. it's the starting point for doing anything. In a bare Windows 95 install, you have your "My Computer" and "My Documents" icons on the desktop and to do everything else you start by clicking on "Start". I don't think I could come up with a better name for the button that serves as the starting point of almost any interaction. Nothing else comes to mind that will both communicate the button's purpose and simultaneously entice users who don't know what to do to click it.

The history of Windows 95 is fascinating. The Mac had a GUI, but overall the penetration of GUIs was very low. Windows 3.1 was getting popular, but Microsoft knew they had to something special to make GUIs mainstream (remember, DOS still ruled) and expand the market for PCs to people who'd never considered buying a computer.

It was a different time. The Windows 95 team had this idea of a "beginner's UI" to make computers more approachable -- an idea they subsequently shelved. But their research told them that:

> Beginning users and many intermediates relied almost exclusively on visible cues for finding commands. They relied on (and found intuitive) menu bars and tool bars, but did not use pop-up (or "context") menus, even after training

Ironically newer UI designers have forgotten that 'visible cues' lesson -- both on Windows 10's Flat UI and on touch interfaces such as iPad OS, which imho suffers from really poor discoverability.

> Although we abandoned the idea of a separate shell for beginners, we salvaged its most useful features: single-click access, high visibility, and menu-based interaction. We mocked up a number of representations in Visual Basic and tested them with users of all experience levels, not just beginners, because we knew that the design solution would need to work well for users of varying experience levels. Figure 5 shows the final Start Menu, with the Programs sub-menu open. The final Start Menu integrated functions other than starting programs, to give users a single-button home base in the UI.

(Here's a picture of what earlier iterations of the UI looked like: https://imgur.com/IWCGPzU)

These extracts and image are from Kent Sullivan's very readable "The Windows 95 user interface: a case study in usability engineering": https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=238611 (previously discussed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12330899)

The upshot is: "Start" is just a label that worked well during UX testing, what mattered more was the anchored, affordance-rich, highly consistent button that let you interact with the GUI in a predictable way.

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