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The Weird History of the Microsoft Windows Start Button

Posted by samzenpus on from the and-that's-what-happened dept.

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.

14 of 270 comments (clear)

  1. wtf? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Windows 3.1 wasn't complicated at all. What kind of moron thinks otherwise??

    1. Re:wtf? by unixisc · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Until it got changed in Windows 8

    2. Re:wtf? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      > But now imagine if all your computer interaction before Win 3.1 had been on the command line?

      Well, it was not. Young'ums might think we're talking about the Paleozoic, but a lot of things already had happened before Windows.

      Menus already existed in many forms and fashions, games had "Options" screens and purported different paradigms for interaction. I vaguely remember games with scenes in which a desktop would have elements (photos, notes, etc.).

      What didn't exist back then was interaction -- and even that came before Windows with the first BBSes.

      For an example of a typical menu of that time, see the Apple Pascal Welcome screen at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Pascal

      Visicalc had a similar feature with a top screen menu bar (a la Apple) which would be called with the "/" keyboard shortcut. It was much faster to use than Excel.

      I found this excerpt particularly enlightening:

      "If users couldn't figure out where to go in Windows, Oran says, it was a design failure. So instead, he thought to give them one single button to push that led them to everything, the same way he had to teach the chimps, button by button, how to use software.

      Originally, Oran says, it was called the "System" button, and it lived at the top of the screen. But for whatever reason, maybe because it sounded too technical, users in these Windows studies wouldn't click a System button no matter what.

      But once they renamed it the "Start" button, people understood it intuitively."

      It's important to know that the world had a different mindset at the time: people enjoyed using jargon, ordinary folks were not supposed to understand computers. A lot of terminology also referred to abstractions far removed from daily realities (a stack, a register, CRTs, etc.).

      The idea behind the WIMP model pioneered at Xerox was making computing intuitive -- and Jobs was on the same frequency -- more than anyone. He had ideas about making computers as homely as TV sets (Apple II ads already conveyed that idea).

      Microsoft was (and _is_) a follower and the idea was "putting a PC on every home". Compare that with "making a computer which goes beyond the users expectations" (the Apple way).

      The word "System" for menu evokes the "professional" idea. This is enough to scare non-IT folks. Maybe there's a lesson here for Linux, since everybody who wants to have success with it (Google, Canonical etc.) avoids that name like the plague.

      For the record, my difficulty with Windows 3.x was about display modes, not operation. Then again, I was previously a programmer...

    3. Re:wtf? by ArchieBunker · · Score: 4, Insightful

      He most likely has a PhD in his field. He is the master of that one specific area. Everything else is foreign and complicated to him.

      --
      Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
  2. Difficulty by nmb3000 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
    /)
    1. Re:Difficulty by gweilo8888 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Mod parent up. For goodness sakes, I was 17 years old when Windows 3.x first came out, had precisely zero training of any kind, and figured out how to use its GUI all by myself in the space of about ten seconds. It's not just a useless statement, it's also a vast and very obvious over-exaggeration.

    2. Re:Difficulty by mcrbids · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Being an astrophysicist doesn't make you at all qualified to use a VCR. (Wait, who uses VCRs anymore?! I haven't touched one in almost two decades!) But it *does* mean that we're not talking about an idiot. And if you're trying to target your product to be usable for the average joe, and an astrophysicist can't figure it out, you can assume that you missed your target.

      --
      I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
  3. Re:Major change? No. by PsychoSlashDot · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    Um. You know that Windows 3.1 didn't actually have a Start Button, right?

    --
    "Oh no... he found the .sig setting."
  4. Re:"to this very day..." by PopeRatzo · · Score: 4, Insightful

    He invented something so he got a 18-year country-wide monopoly on the idea. What's the problem?

    He invented a place on your computer desktop that you can click with a mouse and it will open a menu.

    Genius, I tell you. Who would have ever thought something like that was possible?

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

    --
    You are welcome on my lawn.
  5. Re:simple ideas aren't obvious? by Stormwatch · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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

    To be fair... the largest smartphones are still tiny compared to the screen of any desktop computer. Also, your input is far less precise than keyboard and mouse. You have to make some sacrifices to design an interface suitable for that hardware.

    But then came Windows 8, trying to put a mobile interface on the desktop. Now that was just idiotic.

    --
    Circumcision is child abuse.
  6. This tells you everything... by Dutch+Gun · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
  7. Re:MenuChoice and HAM (1992) by CronoCloud · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Otherwise known as soft links or symbolic links, which DEC and RDOS have had since 1978.

    and in Unix even before that

  8. Re:Somewhat less intuitive by Xest · · Score: 3, Insightful

    It makes a good joke, but it's not really that unintuitive, you're basically saying Start Shutdown.

    This is in the exact same way that in Linux "shutdown now" doesn't actually shutdown now, it just begins the shutdown now. Computers don't cleanly turn off instantly, shutdown is a process that you start.

  9. Re:MenuChoice and HAM (1992) by hudsucker · · Score: 4, Insightful

    No, not the same thing (though similar in purpose). A shortcut is a file whose content is parsed by the software/OS to determine the location of the target, while a symbolic/soft link is a filesystem object that points to target.

    Ah, so Windows 95 shortcuts weren't copying Unix, it was copying Mac OS aliases. Which were introduced in System 7, in 1991. Except that aliases still worked even if the target was renamed or moved to a different location, while shortcuts break.