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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??
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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...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:[.]
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
Windows 3.1 did not have a "Start" menu. Windows 3.1 had the "Programs" folder, on an otherwise blank desktop.
RISC OS
Somebody was facing a problem. He thought about the problem.
He looked at System 7
He proposed a solution. It worked.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
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.
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...
Sounds like OP is comparing Windows 95 to Windows XP.
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!
Windows 3.1 had "Main", "Acessories", "Games", "Start up", "Application" and then any folders you made up. Kind of like an iOS or Android but better.
Damn, I kind of miss it! Add either a Windows 7-like taskbar on the bottom, or window changing similar to Gnome 3 to make up for the shortcomings.
Also, good old times when you didn't need a GTK2/GTK3 theme expert to create a theme for you, instead you changed the color scheme and wallpaper (or wallpaper "motif"!)
Good freeware games and "multimedia" games like Myst. You double clicked on a game icon and it launched within two seconds and without fears of the computing crashing or the screen blinking. Under linux it still don't know if a game will blow up at me, if I'll need to do ctrl-alt-f1 to kill something and if *that* method will still work after a crash, and there's no stable userspace ABI for freeware, shareware and commercial games to target anyway.
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.
Windows 3.1 did not have a "Start" menu. Windows 3.1 had the "Programs" folder, on an otherwise blank desktop.
A lot like an iPhone. No widgets, nothing complicated, just a bunch of icons.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
Pretty much this. I sort of like the idea of a start menu, but I admit I prefer using hotkeys to Win-t a terminal or Win-e a file explorer or Win-r and run prompt.
The funny thing is that the iOS and Android home screens work a lot more like the Win3.1 interface. And I have to admit I was pretty lost the first time I loaded an Android emulator without having been introduced to the 'swipe'.
/ former Boeing engineer
You double clicked on a game icon and it launched within two seconds
Well...either that, or you got a message saying that you needed to lower/raise the bit depth of your display, enable/disable some memory manager, or something similar. I kind of missed Windows 3.1 too, until I started playing with it in a VM and kept running into all the antiquated bits that I'd forgotten about...then it would make one of the classic "ding" sounds, and I'd forgive it in a wash of nostalgia.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Yep... but remember trying to teach old folks the concept of the "double-click"? And the pain of trying and failing to keep the pointer steady between the first click and the second click, or else you accidentally flick all your precious icons and folders onto the trash? Yeah.
It's amazing that Android and iOS home screens essentially look the same as the Win3.1 desktop... they just finally got rid of the silly double-click. And suddenly it works for grandmas. Huzzah.
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.
Nostalgia? I've been trying to save my final thesis paper for years:
Abort, Retry, Fail? R ....
Abort, Retry, Fail? R
Abort, Retry, Fail? R
Abort, Retry, Fail? R
Abort, Retry, Fail? R
*cries*
that explains all the nasty shocks and having to press the mouse button repeatedly to get a random reward.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
PROGMAN.EXE! They kept it in with every Windows release until XP SP1. If you really want to take a look at it again, here are is some instructions.
==================
Hippie Logger Jock
==================
Yeah, I'm thinking of the change from the Win95 Start menu to the Win7 one. Program Manager, however, acted pretty much as the Start button, you opened it and then navigated folders fairly logically (you wanted an application, you opened the Applications folder and looked there). The applications you used all the time you copied to the desktop so you'd have them at your fingertips. Which, I've noticed, is still how people handle common applications, with "copy it to the taskbar" a close second and the two "pin" options vying for a distant third.
And it still remains: even secretaries had no problem grokking how to work Win3.1's desktop and programs.
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.
Maybe he wasn't familiar with computers or GUI computers. Whether it's command line, GUI or programming languages, communicating with computers still requires learning a language which non-computer users don't know.
Rocket science has nothing to do with GUI interfaces. How would this scientist go about launching the word processor? Explore many paths by clicking on random things?
If I remember the sequence of events correctly, what became known as the 'Win95 GUI' was first released and seen as an optional update / add on to WinNT3.1. Then Win95 was released, and after that NT4 in which it was the only option. So actually the original release was in the NT series.
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?
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...
Which, I've noticed, is still how people handle common applications, with "copy it to the taskbar" a close second and the two "pin" options vying for a distant third.
I run Linux, Fedora 22 using the XFCE desktop. My "panel", which I call the "taskbar" is at the bottom, as the Goddess intended. On that taskbar just to the left of the buttons showing my running applications/windows, are 4 quick launch buttons for my most commonly used applications, in the usual place for quick launch buttons. At the far right of the taskbar is the clock, the notification area is to the left of the clock. I use a specific theme for window decorations where the window title bars are blue and the close button is red.
Why yes it DOES resemble WinXP, why do you ask?
http://forums.fedoraforum.org/...
Strangely I was exposed to KDE and FVWM BEFORE I ever used WinXP. And I had used WinNT4 before I used Win95.
Those folks who came up with the CDE that inspired em all knew what they were doing...designing a GUI that WORKED.
Win32s was released for Windows 3.1, but it just added some win32 APIs, not the UI. The UI was first introduced in the Chicago betas, which were eventually released as Windows 95. NT4 was released shortly afterwards and wasn't a bad OS, but hampered by the lack of plug-and-play support and perpetually having old versions of DirectX.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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
Win 3.1 did not have a desktop. You're still thinking of something else.
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 do like the "Classic" themed Win7 taskbar. Harks back to Win2k but combining the quicklaunch and the button bar, I've got all my "apps" (I fucking hate that word) on there like the OSX Dock only it occupies the entire bottom portion of the screen (or the side of the screen, depends what I'm doing) rather than a less-than-100%-portion of it which is fucking stupid, what're you gonna do with that 10% either side that's not used??.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
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.
My recollection differs. Games were slower under Windows than DOS due to the overhead, and they definitely still crashed. You didn't have to have boot disks with "gaming" configurations to free up enough low memory, though.
That was the true purpose of Solitaire and Minesweeper. They taught the differences between clicking, right-clicking, double-clicking, and click and drag.
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.
Those folks who came up with the CDE that inspired em all knew what they were doing...designing a GUI that WORKED.
The CDE toolbar was hilariously baroque because Unix users were used to having too much screen space, and the window behavior was not-at-all changed from MWM. Microsoft was on the Motif WG, which is why Windows 3.1 and MWM have almost exactly the same windowing behavior, resize grab handles, window management widgets, etc. CDE was also not the first Unix WM to feature a persistent menu; that accolade has to go to NeXTStep, which also placed it in a more logical location.
The single menu bar of the Apple style, a holdover from the mainframe days of yore, did beget the taskbar. And now we have taskbars with start buttons on every desktop. But you can't give CDE much credit at all. It's wholly derivative, and most of what it is... is actually MWM
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
NT4 was released shortly afterwards and wasn't a bad OS, but hampered by the lack of plug-and-play support and perpetually having old versions of DirectX.
In NT4 they merged the User and GDI memory spaces which were separate in 3.51, and made it trivial for the user to asplode the machine in pursuit of graphics performance... which as you point out, they did not actually ever achieve in NT until Windows 2000. This is the precise moment that many people gave up on NT and went to using Unix for their servers even when they had Windows on their desktops.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...
It's actually the Win NT 3.1 desktop, but it looks the same as the Win 3.1 desktop.
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
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.
A trained rocket scientist couldn't open a word processor?
Have you ever watched people try to start Notepad on Window 8?
'WTF? I thought this was Windows? Where's the Start Menu?'
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.
Also, the double-column menu wasn't a thing until Windows XP, I believe.
"Never give up, for that is just the time and place when the tide will change." -Harriet Beecher Stowe ^_^
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)
http://ask.slashdot.org/story/...