Microsoft News Tracker

PC World’s Harry McCracken was doing a little spring cleaning and happened upon a copy of Microsoft Bob. What to do? Why get it running on Windows XP of course! The good news is:

For the record, the package screams–if that’s the word I want–on a 1.7-GHz Athlon XP system with a gig of RAM and GeForce2 graphics.

and the bad news is it’s Bob:

It manages to be a bad idea (it seems to be aimed at a six-year-old who has personal finances to manage) executed even more badly than you’d expect (even in 1995, I suspect the profusion of inexplicable “boing!”-type sound effects would have been annoying). The whole thing is kind of spellbinding, at least if you’re not trying to do real work with it.

More hilarity and plenty of screenshots by following the link. It’s hard to believe that it was only 11 years ago that Bob and the the animated “assistants” made their appearance or that the assistants still exist in Windows XP and Office.