In the mid-1990s, Microsoft attempted to introduce a new interface, Microsoft Bob (Utopia), to replace the aging Windows 3.1. Bob was supposed to radically change the way users interacted with their PCs. The attempt failed, the program was closed, and MS Bob was consigned to oblivion. The era of Windows 95 began. But recently it turned out that the MS Bob code had been happily existing on Windows XP installation CDs for many years.
Image source: Microsoft
Instead of “windows,” the Microsoft Bob interface offered users a new paradigm of a “digital home,” in which all the operating system’s elements, files, folders, and functions were represented as parts of the home. For example, there were separate “rooms” for mail and calendaring, and the home was populated by animated characters (such as Rover the dog) drawn in a friendly cartoon style. The goal was to lower the barriers to entry for newcomers and make computers easier to navigate.
However, user enthusiasm was limited and critical reception was poor. In addition, the new interface had high hardware requirements for the time, such as a whopping 8 MB of RAM. Only about 30,000 copies were sold. Microsoft discontinued Bob a year later, around the time Windows 95 was released. In a sense, the interface was a prototype for modern metaverses, which also failed to find mass acceptance among consumers.
But the MS Bob story did not end there. With the release of Windows XP in 2001, the failed product returned from oblivion, being placed on all licensed installation CDs with the new OS. The fact is that before sending the CDs “for gold”, Microsoft employees discovered that there were as many as 30 MB free on these disks, which is almost 5% of the standard 640-megabyte CD ROM. It was necessary to fill this space, and for this purpose, the encrypted source code of MS Bob was used. According to the plan, this should have caused additional inconvenience for illegal copying of the latest OS from Microsoft, increasing the total volume of data on the CD.
According to former Microsoft employee and Windows developer Raymond Chen, it was “a pretty weak attempt to slow down people making illegal copies of Windows.” The idea was to fill the extra capacity of the CD with dummy data and trick the Windows installer into checking for it. The idea was that pirates downloading a copy of the CD image would have to download an extra 30 MB of data, which in the days of 56 kbps dial-up connections was an inconvenience and a delay for them.
Chen explained why the MS Bob code was used: “[The perpetrator] needed a source for the dummy data. He could have just generated and encrypted 30MB of random bytes, but where’s the fun in that? Instead, he dug through the archives and found a copy of Microsoft Bob. He took all the floppy disk images and combined them into one big file. […] When it came time to enter the encryption key, he just randomly slammed his hand on the keyboard and got an encrypted copy of Microsoft Bob. That’s what ended up in the unused space as ballast data on the Windows XP CD.”
So all owners of licensed Windows XP CDs also got a copy of the completely failed Microsoft Bob “in addition”, without even knowing it. It may have become one of the biggest “Easter eggs” in the history of Microsoft Windows.