Microsoft Corp is either hoping to give novices the creeps about computers or it has forgotten that Twin Peaks was set in the Pacific Northwest and that Bob was one of the more sinister characters in David Lynch’s cult television series. At all events, Bob is the name it has chosen for the new MS-DOS and Windows overlay for technophobic computer tyros previously known as Utopia. Bob is a suite of eight programs designed to make it easy to perform routine household chores: instead of menus and windows, it uses images of rooms in a home and cartoon-like characters to tell the user how to do things. A mouse click on the image of a piece of paper on a desk launches the letter-writing program. It also includes a dairy, an address book, electronic mail software, a program for writing cheques and keeping track of bills, a household manager of information about maintaining a home, a guide to financial information, and a geography game. Users can assign special Bob symbols for their existing programs, so they can launch them from Bob. A string of cartoon characters, such as a dog named Rover, will offer personalised tips as the program keeps track of problems the user is having. The first version of Bob will use on-screen speech balloons, a version with speech recognition and voice response is planned. Bob is due at the end of March at about $100 – but that’s a fraction of the real cost because it requires a ludicrous 8Mb of memory to run. Seemingly taking the image of the company’s chairman in vain, Microsoft has chosen a logo of a yellow happy face wearing glasses to represent Bob – so why not call the thing Bill? According to the Wall Street Journal, Gateway 2000 Inc, Micron Technology Inc, NEC Corp and some smaller manufacturers have agreed to bundle Bob with home computers.
