we've all gotten used to the Windows taskbar and start menu being on the
bottom of the screen by default but why down there and yes i know you can
move them to different parts of the display if you'd like but most folks
leave them exactly where they are so is the bottom of the screen somehow
superior well back in the pre-Windows 95 days
legacy versions of Windows actually supported minimizing programs down into
icons that would sit in a taskbar-like area at the bottom of the screen
but even with that developers at microsoft weren't married to having the
taskbar at the bottom of the screen during the development of Windows 95 the
first version of Windows made with this kind of purpose-made taskbar that we're
used to today in fact one of the development team's original ideas for
the task bar might actually remind you more of today's web browsers instead of
having a bar with buttons on the top of the screen you would have tabs at the
top where each tab would give you access to a running window or program
this was a heck of a lot better than the previous system in older versions of
Windows in which there actually wasn't any quick way to see exactly what you
already had running at any given time because of this many users would just
keep opening multiple instances of the same program rather than restoring a
previous window leading to slowdowns and even crashes my mom did this all the
time it drove me absolutely freaking crazy but there were a couple of big problems
with having the taskbar up top one was that many programs simply wouldn't play
nicely with having it up there you see the pixels on a computer monitor are
arranged with a coordinate system with the first pixel at the top left of the
screen being given the coordinates 0 0
well lots of programs assumed that that was where the usable part of the
screen's real estate started so they would open at the very top of the screen
where the taskbar would obscure them the devs didn't have a very good way to stop
this behavior so they moved the taskbar down to the bottom of the screen of
course macOS users had had their menu bar at the top of the screen for a long
time but that's a different video for a different day we'll tell you more after
we thank team group for sponsoring this video on september 23rd team group is
hosting their annual team event focused on memory the event will revolve around
heat dissipation large capacities and overclocked ddr5 memory and there will
be giveaways with the grand prize being a 3500 gaming pc check out the link in
the description to learn more so how did the start button end up on
the taskbar well space was a real concern during Windows 95's development
since many computer monitors of the day defaulted to relatively low resolutions
with 640x480 being especially popular this
led to a number of design decisions such as using buttons on the taskbar which
were smaller than the originally envisioned tabs as well as putting the
start button on the taskbar in order to consolidate visual elements and
ultimately make the user interface more space efficient and putting the start
button there made sense in other ways as well one of the fundamental problems
facing the development team was to make it easy for users to figure out where
the heck all their stuff was whether it be running programs or other resources
on the computer the old program manager from Windows 3.1 was often criticized as
being hard to navigate to the point that one of the developers claimed that a
boeing rocket scientist was stuck for 20 minutes simply trying to figure out how
to open a word processor so microsoft decided on having a single button be the
gateway for everything on the system including programs files and settings
originally the button was actually labeled system but users didn't want to
click on it in microsoft's usability studies because it sounded overly
technical so the dev team labeled the button start stuck it on the taskbar
which already showed running programs and the system tray and the rest is
history i just hope they never pull another Windows 8 and decide to take it
away from us again thanks for watching guys you can like
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