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The Weird History of the Microsoft Windows Start Button
Gamoid writes: Windows 3.1 was so complicated that even a Boeing propulsion scientist couldn't figure out how to open a word processor. A behavioral scientist, who once worked with BF Skinner at Harvard, was brought in to Microsoft to figure out what was going wrong — and he came up with the Start button, for which he holds the patent today. It's a weird and cool look at how simple ideas aren't obvious.
What's that thing over there on the Mac's menu bar?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
and it will be forever great.
Windows 3.1 wasn't complicated at all. What kind of moron thinks otherwise??
This is not weird at all.
Somebody was facing a problem. He thought about the problem. He proposed a solution. It worked.
That's pretty damn typical!
The total change from the Windows 3.1 Start button to the subsequent Start buttons was making the Start menu a 2-column menu, putting the contents of the former Programs menu in the left pane and putting the rest of the Start menu items in the right pane. That's it. Oh, and making the initial view not show all the Programs items but only a subset, with an extra item at the bottom to show everything in the same form as it was under the Programs menu.
As for Win3.1 being complicated, every secretary I knew managed to get a handle on it within a few days so it couldn't have been that complicated. The only people I know of who couldn't figure out Win3.1 are the ones who to this day need repeated reminders of how to get to anything that's not directly on their desktop, so methinks the problem doesn't lie in Windows.
Windows 3.1 was so complicated that even a Boeing propulsion scientist couldn't figure out how to open a word processor.
What a useless statement. An astrophysicist might have had a difficult time setting his VCR to record All My Children while he was away at work. Just because someone is an expert in one field doesn't make them all-knowing.
Raymond has also posted several articles about the history of the Explorer interface, including one about the origin of the Start Button and one about the taskbar.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
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The windows of old was like using Linux today? Ok.
Windows 3.1 was so complicated that even a Boeing propulsion scientist couldn't figure out how to open a word processor.
I was a child when I used Windows 3.1. It was my second OS, after DOS. I had no problems with it then. In fact, 3.1 was a better platform to learn on than a modern OS because it didn't do everything for you.
...in the matter of having to press START to begin the process of turning off the computer.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
For some people it is difficult, for some it is painfully obvious. So many patents in recent years are ridiculously obvious and it is truly shocking they were ever awarded. Organizations put together the minimum viable example just to get the patent awarded, then may or may not spend substantial time and resources trying to perfect it. Stupid and a waste.
RISC OS
System 7, introduced in 1991, had an Apple menu, which held shortcuts (called "aliases") to applications. Third-party extensions such as MenuChoice and HAM, released the following year, allowed aliases to be grouped into folders. (This is exactly the behavior that Microsoft would later implement in the "Programs" section of Windows 95's Start menu.) Apple later bought the rights to HAM and integrated it in System 7.5 (1995) under the name Apple Menu Options.
How about Hp dashboard for windows 3.x. I think in the later versions you could group programs into small start like menus.
Speaking of old shit. Where's my damn turbo button? I miss that thing so much. Sure it's useless today or maybe not. I could hook it up to the UEFI leads so I can access the bios without rebooting.
On the Nintendo Entertainment System, players pressed the controller's Start button to pause (that is, stop) the game. By the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, many games were adding a quit option to the pause menu, so Start to stop was becoming believable.
"Windows 3.1 was so complicated that even a Boeing propulsion scientist couldn't figure out how to open a word processor."
I'm not a propulsion scientist and I didn't have any problems with it. Remembering DOS commands, on the other hand...
I coulda sworn that prior to OSx there was this Apple Menu Item thingie and you could pretty much modify it to your heart's content. But hey - that was 1990s before CSS turned everything into rounded edges and HTML5 turned everything into swingie woo woo stuff and httprequest made bilge like Facebook possible....
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
32 bit extensions and a graphical shell [on top of] a 16 bit patch to an 8 bit operating system originally coded for a 4 bit microprocessor, written by a 2 bit company, that can't stand 1 bit of competition.
...Why doesn't windows have an end button? Equality FTW!
TFA is a good article, but The "Start Button" was really a non-innovative, pedestrian multi-function, customizable menu button.
I always marvel that people write thinkpieces about "The Start Button" like it was some big tech innovation.
The "Start Button" was, essentially, just like any other "Menu" option in computing every used, it just used a different word. And to that end, ontologically speaking, "Start" was one of the most patronizing, over-simplified, dumbed down choices they could have made and still made it to production.
Thank you Dave Raggett
Oh, how I hate our patent system.
You are welcome on my lawn.
... only in broken jurisdictions that recognize software patents.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Simple ideas are obvious. The key problem is that certain fields attracts certain types of people, and certain types of people have certain traits.
The start menu would have been obvious and intuitive to anyone who has ever dealt with people and people interactions. Sign-makers, psychologists, and pretty much everyone in the medical profession who attempts to understand how people work would have found the start menu incredibly obvious.
Now the modern form over function UX crowd with their hipster indecipherable logos (3 dots for action, 3 lines for menu?) may be heading the wrong direction, but in a more general sense engineers have shown time and time again that on the whole we don't understand how people interact with things.
In general, the more senior ones know a little less about them than a typical 30 year old office worker. Just because a person is smart doesn't make them an expert in every field that takes a little bit of brains.
and i thought Tom's Tab Window Manager was cryptic. And then Icewm was what people used if you hated Enlightenment or XFCE. in reality the opposition towards Linux adoption was Microsoft keeping us all away from the superior abilities of GNUstep (or was is openstep or nextstep). i actaually use Norton Desktop in my ReactOS so sue me dickhead.
In a Skinner box, the lab rat pushes a button and gets a food pellet ... Or, an electric shock... With WinX, pressing the start button has never caused the computer to dispense food, but often the user is shocked by the results ...
Like a good neighbor, fsck is there
This tells you everything you need to know about UX designers:
It's something that gives Danny Oran, the ex-Microsoft interface designer who holds the patents for the Windows 95 Start menu and taskbar, mixed feelings.
"In some ways, it's a little disappointing the same stuff is in there," Oran says.
It's a simple, intuitive interface element that everyone who uses a PC can easily figure out how to use. Yeah, terrible tragedy, that. It's so old and crusty now, right? Who cares if people are, you know, actually getting shit done with their PC. We need some hip, new paradigm that people have to re-learn all over again.
Seriously, what the hell? Stop screwing up interfaces that are functional and familiar! I wonder if the designer of the automobile's steering wheel would have "mixed feelings" about that interface still being used in cars nearly a century later?
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
that explains all the nasty shocks and having to press the mouse button repeatedly to get a random reward.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Boeing propulsion scientist ...
So what exactly the hell did this guy learn for 8 years and $300k in education? I remember running 3.11 as a Junior in high school in a po dink town, and I never had trouble w 3.11. Seriously?!? A trained rocket scientist couldn't open a word processor?
Am I the only one who doesn't "welcome it back"? I haven't used the start button since WinME, I was thankful it was finally gone. Now, one of the best features to date, the left screen menu is gone, the start menu button is back clogging space, and some other crap has decided to appear on the bottom bar for no logical reason other than, what, people not liking change?
And in case you still weren't sure what to do with a button labeled "Start", the first time you booted into Win95, an arrow would slide along the taskbar from the right to the left with some text telling you to click the button.
A fucking patent on a fucking start button.
And we're supposed to admire the guy for his immeasurable contribution to the history of computing?
Bitch please. Go draw a plane or something.
"Blah blah blah." - [citation needed]
programs in a menu?
If you're going to have a graphical user interface that's organized with menus, how is it not fucking obvious that the programs will be in a menu?
Of course he can't, it's not his job to know the ins and outs of an OS.
You may as well say "IT guy stumbles at landing a plane" for all the difference it would make.
Maybe I missed it, but there appeared to be no references to Windows Chicago at all? The article makes it seem like the START button just appeared out of thin air, not a series of trial and error over time. Check out this document which highlights the evolutionary processes that happened between Windows 3.1 and 95
http://oyvind.servehttp.com/wi...
Firstly, how could this person have more trouble opening a Word Processor in 3.1 than 95+??
I mean, the only possible problem this person could have had was not knowing how to *double-click* on the Icon for the Word Processor.
In Win3.1, the icon for the Word Processor would have been RIGHT IN FRONT OF HIM in the Program Manager!
In 95+, he would have had to click on the Start Button, click on All Programs, scan around the gigantic menu of programs for Microsoft Office or Word Perfect or whatever, then slide ACROSS to open the menu group (Being careful not to slide off and activate another menu!), and then DOWN to the program and clicking on it - A much more difficult and dexterous task than just moving the mouse pointer to an icon and double clicking on it as it would have been in Win3.1!!!
This is why EVERYONE puts shortcuts on their desktop nowadays - The Startmenu is a fucking PITA to navigate!
I've always said the Start Button is a horrible and stupid idea - The Win3.1 Program Manager was MUCH better.
Everything was laid out in front of you and you could arrange it the way you liked. Put frequently used programs into a group, or have a sub group open with stuff you use on the first row, lessor used things underneath, shrink the window to only show the first row to save space so you'd have to scroll down to the less-used items.
Multiple-groups visible for different groupings of tasks.
The Start Button just goes to a glorified menu where you have to scroll for AGES just to find what you want if there is a lot of stuff installed.
And it's been getting *WORSE* - At least in 95-2K the Start Menu filled the screen; In XP the default was to fucking SCROLL up and down it with these *TINY* scroll hover areas and if, like me, you had lots of programs that could take forever!
In Win7, I have several times installed something, then been unable to find it because the list is constricted to a tiny box; The one good thing about Win7 is the quicksearch in the bottom of the Start Menu, but the irony is the stupid thing is so slow that sometimes it doesn't seem to get newly installed programs so you have to sit there. Waiting.
And Windows 8? Sweet mother of Steve, not only is it ugly, but it's unusable too! Install a program? Where does it go? Nobody knows! How do you access the control panel? Psychic powers! Hover over this invisible area that has no other indications that it is there!
I was hoping to God, Allah and the FSM that Windows 10 would be better, but no it's just Windows 8 with a Menu mod. I may as well have downloaded ClassicShell for Windows 8!
I had over a decade of computer experience when I first encountered Windows 3.0 and even so I was barely able to use it as the designers intended. I totally failed to see "windows" on the screen - instead to me they looked like overlapping rectangles which randomly concealed part of what you were doing. I was like wtf this is supposed to be the latest new thing? To make an even worse user experience this was on a monochrome 286 with 1MB RAM which was sloowww, hence even harder to see the relationship between things you clicked and things that happened.
"Don't belong. Never join. Think for yourself. Peace." V.Stone, Microsoft Corporation
Riddle me this:
How many Microsoft developers have designed a jet engine?
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
"Windows 3.1 was so complicated that even a Boeing propulsion scientist couldn't figure out how to open a word processor."
All Slashdot submissions should be run through a fallacy checker prior to acceptance.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
"BF Skinner at Harvard, was brought in to Microsoft to figure out what was going wrong — and he came up with the Start button, for which he holds the patent today. It's a weird and cool look at how simple ideas aren't obvious.
It's news to me that Microsoft invented the drop-down menu, which is what the START button basically is, except it's on-the-left and up-side-down.
I remember computing before Windows 3.1 well. I remember using DOS 3 along with Wordperfect 2 and Lotus 123. When Windows 3.0 and later 3.1 was layered over DOS I thought; 'My God, it's like Berkley Softworks GEOS(Commodore)!'.
It was as if the heavens opened and the angels sang. The PC immediately got insanely easier to use, more usable, more accessible even to the less computer literate. Don't let any revisionist history morons kid you. Microsoft Windows 3.1 changed the fucking world! It literally changed humanity. You're present day computing existence would never have happened without Microsoft and Windows 3.1.
Apple launched its GUI(literally stolen from Xerox) initiative before Windows 3, but it was not the Earth shaking event that Windows was a few years later. Mac wasn't nearly as usable or accessible as Windows.
Somebody should have showed him how to use Program Manager.
I rented a Ford Focus. It has all these screens, keypads and shit.
There was one very large button labeled Radio. I pressed it and nothing happened. Turns out that you had the press the much smaller button only labeled Vol to turn the radio on. Then there were these button on the center console, right in the middle and above the volume button. Unlabeled. Left to tune down, right to tun up...right? Nope. It control the "feature selection" on a screen on the dash. Tuning buttons were much smaller and in the upper right and only labeled with a left arrow and right arrow.
Then I looked down by the shifter. There, was a placard that said, "Powered by Microsoft".
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Didn't leave disappointed.
I recall IBM's OS/2 had a similar button before Windows 95 as well, I thought it was a patch or addon from IBM in Warp 3 and then was release as part of the OS in Warp 4 (though 4 came out in 96 I think).
On Compact Cassette decks with mechanical controls, the pause button actually lifts the pinch roller from the tape. The motors have inertia to ensure constant tape speed, more than the tape reels, and stopping the tape by lifting the pinch roller reacts faster than by lifting the motor.
I happen to be a Boeing propulsion scientist, and I had no problems figuring out how to open a word processor in Windows 3.1.
Get the tiles off the desktop. I have lots of icons, for programs, folders, files, etc., that will be obscured by tiles. Win7 GUI is good, one reasons I never moved to 8 is tiles.
Under MacOS (no spaces = "classic")
Apple has always used a space with Mac OS since it officially adopted the term for 7.6. (Source: Installing Mac OS 7.6)
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