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Do You Remember Bob?

GdoL writes: "Do you remember Bob? Byte's editor starts his monthly column talking about Bob the OS Interface from Microsoft in the middle 1990s. And he didn't forget either Bob the programming language from a former technical editor of Dr. Dobbs Journal, David Betz. This OO language is widely use on 'DVD players and set-top boxes produced by the likes of Toshiba, Samsung, and Motorola.' Do you remember any other language long forgotten that is still used in the real world?"

12 of 315 comments (clear)

  1. C? by SwingGeek · · Score: 2, Funny

    How about C? I hear some people still use it where VB and JavaScript won't work.

    Heh.

  2. BOB a hollywood OS by XenoBOFH · · Score: 2, Funny

    If I remember correctly BOB had an "feature" that let you assign a new password if you after three login attempts still hadn't given the correct password.

  3. I am waiting for MS-bob.net for linux by Billly+Gates · · Score: 3, Funny

    Its rumoured that linus is one of the animated characters. I would love to hear him explain why XP just crashed.

  4. HTML by Chas · · Score: 1, Funny

    Look at the crap that passes for it on some of these "you must use BrowserXYZ" to view this site" sites.

    ;)

    --


    Chas - The one, the only.
    THANK GOD!!!
  5. Dr. Fun Cartoon that sums it up so well... by weave · · Score: 3, Funny
    This is still hanging on my office wall...

    UNIX Gurus in Hell

    1. Re:Dr. Fun Cartoon that sums it up so well... by cmclean · · Score: 2, Funny
      Actually, I think this one sums slashdot up pretty well ;-)

      cmclean

      --
      "Any similarity between the hooting of a million eager monkeys and Slashdot is purely coincidental." -THEFLASHMAN
  6. Subgenius by nickovs · · Score: 5, Funny

    Bob is a language. Bob is an OS interface. Bob is everything. You would know this if you had joined the Church of the Subgenius.

    May Bob be with you.

    --
    If intelligent life is too complex to evolve on its own, who designed God?
  7. x86.. by wackybrit · · Score: 2, Funny

    Yeah, I remember a really crappy obsolete language, called something like 'x86'. To write even the simplest program you had to write about 1000 lines.

    You could barely do anything with a single line of code. Whereas in Perl, you can make the coffee and clean your bedroom in one line, with the obsolete 'x86' you had to pretty much write a bible-worth of code.

    I reckon they should consign x86 to the scrap-heap and make Intel processors run directly on BASIC instead.

  8. The disaster that was Bob... by jht · · Score: 3, Funny

    As we all know, Microsoft is absolutely merciless when it comes to tolerating failure. People get bounced out of the company constantly.

    So does anyone want to guess what happened to the program manager for Bob?

    That's right. Bill Gates married her. Go figure.

    The idea of predictive interfaces was interesting, but Bob had the fatal flaw of being way too complicated for the hardware of the day. Some of the technology lives on in Office's Clippy, but Bob itself was a disaster to the point that even the people who pirated it returned it.

    --
    -- Josh Turiel
    "2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
  9. Re:Remembering Bob by yomegaman · · Score: 2, Funny

    That's when my father bought his Gateway too, I remember helping him set it up and getting a kick out of Bob. Totally useless, but the little geography quiz game rocks! We played it for hours.

    --
    ...wearing a skin-tight topless leather jumpsuit, with cutaway buttocks and transparent crotch panel.
  10. Solder by sks · · Score: 2, Funny

    One of my favorite quotes is from Steve Ciarcia, who wrote the long-running Circuit Cellar column in Byte (long since evolved into Circuit Cellar Ink Magazine). Steve preferred to do most of his work in hardware, and viewed software as a necessary evil upon occaison. Steve said this in one column, and it's now immortalized: "My favorite programming language is solder."

  11. Bob XP is out by Draginol · · Score: 2, Funny

    You can see Bob alive on Windows today as a DesktopX theme (www.desktopx.net).

    Theme is on Wincustomize:
    http://www.wincustomize.com/preview2.asp?source= ht tp://www.wincustomize.com/library/accounts/Frogboy /dx/bobxp.jpg

    It's Just for fun. Nobody in their right mind would run this as their UI. Just like no one in their right mind would use Bob before. ;)