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 taskbar 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 00.
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. 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
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