Microsoft Bob was the golden future that could have been. An aborted Windows interface from 1995, featuring a wholesome family room atmosphere and a canine companion, domesticated by the Australopithecus about 30 million years ago when he needed an animal friend to help him launch his spreadsheet application, back when the Neanderthal was dancing around a bonfire rubbing shit in his hair and making "oog" noises.
Another big plus is that while you're spending anywhere up to 20 years underground in a corrugated steel drum, waiting to repopulate the Earth with Bill Bixby characters, you're going to need some kind of an escapist fantasy of a real, life-like home environment. The Start Bar just ain't gonna accomplish that. Bob is less like a GUI in that respect, and more like a nice warm hug.
UPDATE : This baby runs on legacy hardware like a dream. Any 386 SX with north of 2MB of RAM should fit the bill. That ties in nicely with my peculiar goal to distribute Fault-OS on a 1.44MB diskette. Never mind the fact that virtually nothing supports a floppy disk drive - in the unlikely event that you can salvage one from a post apocalyptic pawn shop - my psychological fixation on obsolete removable media means you're pretty much screwed.
I suffer from CDO. It's like OCD, except the letters are arranged in correct alphabetical order.
P.S. If you're not into any of that fancy schmancy PC paraphernalia, Jane was Bob's spiritual predecessor from 10 years prior. Back in '85, you could slap Jane onto a Commodore 64 or a 128, for those of us who like a bit of the real thing every now and then. Let's face it, our overall goal here is simplicity and cost effectiveness. Lowest common denominator stuff.
But then of course before that, we had the Atari... Gimme a minute here..
