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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?"
While reading the first article, I was struck by something strange:
In the picture of the Bob UI, it shows a little dog who has a caption bubble coming from his mouth. Well, in WinXP if you do a file search (hit F3), you'll see an almost identical dog.
Maybe Microsoft thought that Bob was ahead of its time?
Anyway, it's strange.
-- Dan
I worked at a nuclear power plant for a while working on the plant monitoring systems. All the PC-based stuff was written for OS/2 using Modula-2. Anybody ever use Modula-2? Anyone ever use it outside of a first year CS class? Turns out it's actually a great language for systems programming, at least with the Object Oriented extensions that the version I used came with. It was actually a lot like Delphi. And much nicer to debug than C++.
___
Cogito cogito, ergo cogito sum.
Its rumoured that linus is one of the animated characters. I would love to hear him explain why XP just crashed.
http://saveie6.com/
I don't know if it's still in use, but it sure was odd. DataSaab was a division of Saab, and they had their own hardware and system software.
DIL16 was DataSaab Interpretive Language for their 16-bit minis. Looked like assembler but had no registers, and yes, it was interpreted. Completely bizarre. I used it to work on a teller system at Citibank in the mid 70s.
Any other DIL16 programmers out there?
The greatest string processing language of all time. Blows away Perl. In SNOBOL4, the space was (is!) an unbelievably powerful pattern-matching operator. A single match could break apart a string and assign variables with pieces of it. A single statement could succeed or fail, and then there were up to to transfers of control at the end, one for success and one for failure.
... the list goes on.
SNOBOL4 was completely flexible on type, (e.g. you could do "5" + 3); had dynamic memory allocation and garbage collection; had the ability to evaluate dynamically generated SNOBOL4
It's probably still in use, and it was bizaare and wonderful. I also have fond memories of two compiler courses taught by RBK Dewar, one of the implementers of the Spitbol implementation of SNOBOL4.
Hmmmmmm...... how about Latin? Not everything has to be computer related...
S.t.e.v.e.
UNIX Gurus in Hell
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?
Just in case anyone is wondering...
It's hard to find any documentation for the Bob language. Having a quick look at some Bob source code, it is a simple OO language without classes, where subclassing is the same as instantiation, much like Self or Cecil. It seems to support only single inheritance, though I gather it's dynamically typed, so there's no need for "interface inheritance".
It's not "purely" object-oriented, since you can define procedures that are not methods of any class. At first glance, there doesn't seem to be any access control: all features of an object are public.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Last time I checked there were very few books being published on it and most new developers have never heard of it. However, several large insurance companies still use an app written in it. It appears they all bought the source code and continue to modify it to keep things up to date.
As a tip, if you are ever called out to do a consulting gig and the customer mentions "Visual DOS", run like hell.
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."
Bob wasn't just a random experiment. Read _The Media Equation_, by Reeves and Nass. A very readable account of psychological experiments that show how people respond to computers, and to technology in general. Much of this research went into Bob, and later the Office Assistant. I'd love to know what went wrong.
Some examples: People watching a news program on a TV *set* labeled "news television" will rate that program as more informative and authoritative than those watching the same program on a TV labeled "general-purpose television". People using a computer program that praises another computer program will rate it smarter than a program that criticizes another program. Larger pictures will be better remembered and better liked than smaller pictures. People will rate a speaking tutorial program more honestly if the rating program uses a different voice!
Fascinating stuff.
For those interested in old languages...
"The Retrocomputing Museum is dedicated to programs that induce sensations that hover somewhere between nostalgia and nausea -- the freaks, jokes, and fossils of computing history. Our exhibits include many languages, some machine emulators, and a few games.
Most are living history -- environments that were once important, but are now merely antiques. A few never previously existed except as thought experiments or pranks. Most, we hope, convey the hacker spirit -- and if not that, then at least a hint of what life was like back when programmers were real men and sheep were nervous."
http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/retro/
Mason, Buildkernel and more: http://www.stearns.org/
And then there's PostScript. PostScript isn't forgotten, but there aren't a whole lot of programmers who know how to use it. It's a rather unwieldy language with a lot of primatives, but it looks a lot like forth. I preferred it over forth though, as it struck me as being a lot cleaner. If I were going to use a reverse polish notation language, it'd be a stripped down version of PostScript. If anyone wants to learn PostScript, Adobe sells a language reference manual and some tutorials that cover the language very nicely. Ghostscript is all the language interpreter you need. Then you could do cool stuff like make the printer compute and print calendars for you.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
OK, first I have to admit that I was one of the developers for Bob. Don't hold it against me, it has been a long time since I worked for Microsoft. Most of the other Bob developers have long since left as well.
Bob, was one of the very, very few truly creative product attempts for the general market Microsoft has ever made. The first version was deeply flawed, but it also had some very good ideas. Microsoft is not very comfortable with the messiness of creativity and so like a foreign microbe Bob got expelled before these problems could be fixed. Version 2 got cancelled just a week before going into general beta.
The product started out as skunk works, and if it had stayed like that, we might have done a better job. However, I think the biggest curse was that mid-project our Product Unit Manager (PUM) became Melinda French, soon to become Melissa Gates. Melinda never had much direct say in the product, but she was obviously very well connected. We then got showered with money and developers and it went to our heads. It has become a very good object lesson to me on the dangers of over-engineering.
What I find distressing, though is that the good ideas that were in Bob are ignored, and no other product seems to be picking them up.
Here are some of the key ideas:
* Menus are not necessarily the best UI. Think about it; they are passive, they quite often show lots of options that are in appropriate, and the commands are stuffed in all sorts of weird places. Even experienced users have trouble finding some of the options.
* A shockingly high percentage of people are still scared of computers. If you are truly going to create consumer software you have to address this somehow.
* UI is a conversation. GUI's are built on the realization that we are very visual creatures. But what about tapping into our sociability? We are very social creatures. There is a body of evidence that shows that people interact in a social way with their computer (really!). That is where the characters come in -- in extensive usability tests we found a real benefit to them. They helped allay the fear factor and they served as a useful UI metaphor -- UI as a conversation. By the way, the characters were always completely optional -- there was a very easy way to turn them off completely.
*Task basked UI. Most programs are general purpose programs that do quite a number of things. The only problem is that the vast majority of people only use a small fraction of the features. One solution is to take the code for word processing and present it as a family of specialized tasks. So you would end up with a letter writer, a report writer, an e-mail writer, a list maker, etc.
I wrote Bob's Letter Writer. This may sound like a weird specialization, but since we knew that people using this particular program were just writing letters, we could do a great job of making mail merge easy, and also doing neat graphic effects (ala Publisher) that would appeal to someone writing a letter to a friend.
* Files are a low level concept. I mean really -- why should the common user have to care about such a geeky thing as a file? They just want to get their document. They could care less about whatever low level construct the developers have come up with to store this information, and really they shouldn't have to. It is weird that we still do not have an object oriented OS. My biggest disappointment with Linux is that it has done very little to push forward truly new ideas (I'm still rooting for it though).
On a technical side, the reason why Bob performed so poorly was because we tried to create the very first OLE component system that worked just as well for C++ as for Visual Basic. VB was not yet up to the challenge, and yet most of the apps were done in VB. We also used every Microsoft technology (the Jet database engine, the Quill word processing engine, VBA, etc.) and yet machines of that time only had 4 megabytes of memory! We required way too much memory for the time -- probably around 12 MB. The graphics looked bad because we had such a tight memory budget that we did not use any bitmaps at all. Everything was done with meta files (vector objects). On top of that we had to write to Windows 3.1 -- 16 bit programming.
I had to read this book for a graduate Mass Comm class two years ago, and it is without a doubt the most awful excuse for experimental science that I have ever seen. Unfortunately for the authors, I had taken a class in research methods before I encountered their book (they should consider doing the same).
It's shoddy science, through and through. They ignore intervening variables, operate every experiment without controls, provide no accounting for intercoder reliability, the samples are always too small to be statistically significant (only one had more than 30 participants, many had less than ten), and comprised of forced participants (Reeves' and Nass's freshmen psych students at Stanford, to be precise. Even without a grade on the line, that's a bad sample). Usually, they rely on reported rather than observed behavior, and the only operating hypothesis ever examined is their goofy "equation" (you want me to spoil the beginning of the book for you? Here is The Media Equation: Media Equals Real Life. That's it. Word for word).
As if that wasn't enough, they make constant generalizations of their results (which with forced, nonrandom sampling is the first thing thrown out the window). They grandstand on every turn -- everything supports the Media Equation, and there is nothing it doesn't affect. You should always be suspicious when "scientists" do thirty experiments and always find their hypothesis supported exactly how they predicted. It's usually bunk, and in this case, it's a pantload. In one instance, they even admit to writing the hypothesis AFTER the experiment was performed. They make repeated references to other "research" in this area, but if you read through the bibliogrpahy, they are merely citing *themselves* from previous experiments. Many of these experiments, if you were interested, have still not been accepted for publication, many years after they were done. Most are not even available at the authors own Web sites. If it weren't for the fact that The Media Equation was published by Reeves & Nass's employer, I doubt whether they could've goten it published at all.
It's bad science, and it's only an afterthought: they plainly thought up their "equation" first, and then set out to prove it. That's the Scientific Method in reverse, people.
Let me give you one quick example in reference to the poster above: in the larger/smaller pictures experiment mentioned above, they show participants photographs of people's faces, some in close up and others standing 10 yards away. And the "test" is showing the subject another photo of the same people, and seeing which person the recognize most often. Guess what: it's the person who's face they saw in close-up. Surprised? You shouldn't be. No thinking adult would be; you see the face close up so you see more detail, and see it better. Plain and simple. But that's not the conclusion Reeves and Nass come up with; they decide instead that this turn of events means that you are having a psychological reaction to the face, and the biger face makes you happier because it seems more like a person. So if you think it's a person, you will remember it better.
That's the media equation, you see? The more person-like an electronic communication is, the better it works. The only time this has been tried under real-world circumstances, of course, is their grand experiment: Microsoft Bob. Funny how well that went over, huh.
Man, I hate that book.
Nate
PS - you might try the following link to Amazon, I submitted the review under "n8willis": here.
PPS - if anybody cares, I'll follow up what I say by emailing them the paper I had to write about this ridiculously bad book; it goes into more detail. Or perhaps I'll submit it as a /. book review. I meant to at the time, but it was just way too long....
-- Watch the REAL Jon Katz.