An inconvenient computer.

So for all of you doing what I'm doing right now, tapping words into a computer, think back to those early machines you trusted your best prose to. Was it a Wang? An Adam? Maybe like me it was a Vic 20. I can remember writing line by line entire programs into the poor little Vic till I fainted and then handed the chore off to my wife to go for as long as she could. In the end the program was buggy, and if I had been a fool, and I often was, I did not have enough storage memory to keep it. I sometimes left the thing on for weeks while I tried to master some crazy ass program I thought was good for me.

My first PC was a work cast off that didn't work. Turns out the PC's battery was dead. They didn't make it anymore so I soldered 2 AA's together and soldered that to the motherboard. Voila! Next was getting the mighty 4mb hard drive to fire up. Seems it had hundreds of bad sectors. Now you have no idea how big 4mb is of anything until you go pissing around in it to try and get your computer to start on a GOOD sector. But luck and hard work prevailed; read that as tedium, and it fired up. Good old Windows 3.1!!

If you were like me I got the my current computer just when that OS was being upgraded so there was a surplus of software for 3.1 out there going real cheap. Software that came with 1900 page manuals and 16 floppys. I yearned for a Windows 95 machine, a real computer.

If anything happened at all in the computer world with the advent of the PC and Mac was the almost immediate death of hundreds of other brands. Not just competing brands but competing technology. The mighty Amiga with all its innovation and power was an odd duck in a sea of comformity. PC's were moving from the office to the home and some were moving into self employment (folks were making money just with a computer, not just using it in the office). So it wasn't long before the software designers had to soften the computer's image. Apple had that aced from the start with cute names and cool cases, but Windows machines were, well boxes. They were hardware. Sounds invasive.

Enter Bob. Anyone who knows me will readily confirm my fondness for Bobs. I have a bird named Bob, call everyone Bob and named a few computers Bob too. Seems the good folk at Microsoft had a love for Bob too. Somewhere between 3.1 and 95 Microsoft introduced BOB.

It was dubbed a "social interface". From what I have seen of it, it looks kind of like a Sims game with the user doing stuff on their computer by entering rooms and interacting with household objects. Some of which do nothing. How cute and effective. Speaking of which, we owe those cute paper clippy guys and puppy dog helpers on Microsoft applications of yore to Bob.

For a witty and informative look at Bob, I know you want to, check out this PC World Techblog http://blogs.pcworld.com/techlog/archives/001614.html

More fun than a long boat full of Vikings.