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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.
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 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
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.
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.
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.
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
Otherwise known as soft links or symbolic links, which DEC and RDOS have had since 1978.
and in Unix even before that
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.