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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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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
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.
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.
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.
Well, in Windows 95/98/ME, the start button was misnamed, it should have been "Try" or "Attempt to" (but no guarantee, YMMV).
Oh, how I hate our patent system.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.
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.
I used to work at Boeing. Some of those people are still looking for the 'Any' key.
Have gnu, will travel.
But "Start" was the only obvious choice after Microsoft paid off The Rolling Stones to use Start Me Up in their advertising.
"It makes a grown man cry"
Very fitting choice.
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*
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 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...
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.
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.
lol I didn't learn that process till I ruined a computer turning it off with the power switch on the back.