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.

Comments

Difficulty

[nmb3000]

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.

Re:Difficulty

[gweilo8888]

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.

This tells you everything...

[Dutch Gun]

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?

Re:MenuChoice and HAM (1992)

[CronoCloud]

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

and in Unix even before that