WEBVTT

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We've all gotten used to the Windows taskbar and start menu being on the bottom of the screen by

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default, but why down there? And yes, I know you can move them to different parts of the display

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if you'd like, but most folks leave them exactly where they are. So is the bottom of the screen

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somehow superior? Well, back in the pre-Windows 95 days, legacy versions of Windows actually supported

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minimizing programs down into icons that would sit in a taskbar-like area at the bottom of the

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screen. But even with that, developers at Microsoft weren't married to having the taskbar at the

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bottom of the screen during the development of Windows 95, the first version of Windows made

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with this kind of purpose-made taskbar that we're used to today. In fact, one of the development

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team's original ideas for the taskbar might actually remind you more of today's web browsers.

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Instead of having a bar with buttons on the top of the screen, you would have tabs at the top,

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where each tab would give you access to a running window or program. This was a

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heck of a lot better than the previous system in older versions of Windows in which there

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actually wasn't any quick way to see exactly what you already had running at any given time.

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Because of this, many users would just keep opening multiple instances of the same program

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rather than restoring a previous window, leading to slowdowns and even crashes. My mom did this

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all the time. It drove me absolutely freaking crazy. But there were a couple of big problems

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with having the taskbar up top. One was that many programs simply wouldn't play nicely with

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having it up there. You see, the pixels on a computer monitor are arranged with a coordinate

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system, with the first pixel at the top left of the screen being given the coordinates 00.

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Well, lots of programs assumed that that was where the usable part of the screen's real estate

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started, so they would open at the very top of the screen where the taskbar would obscure them.

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The devs didn't have a very good way to stop this behavior, so they moved the taskbar down

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to the bottom of the screen. Of course, macOS users had had their menu bar at the top of the

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screen for a long time, but that's a different video for a different day. So how did the start

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button end up on the taskbar? Well, space was a real concern during Windows 95's development,

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since many computer monitors of the day defaulted to relatively low resolutions,

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with 640x480 being especially popular. This led to a number of design decisions,

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such as using buttons on the taskbar, which were smaller than the originally envisioned tabs,

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as well as putting the start button on the taskbar in order to consolidate visual elements

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and ultimately make the user interface more space-efficient. And putting the start button

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there made sense in other ways as well. One of the fundamental problems facing the development

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team was to make it easy for users to figure out where the heck all their stuff was,

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whether it be running programs or other resources on the computer. The old program manager from

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Windows 3.1 was often criticized as being hard to navigate to the point that one of the developers

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claimed that a Boeing rocket scientist was stuck for 20 minutes simply trying to figure out how

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to open a word processor. So Microsoft decided on having a single button be the gateway for

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everything on the system, including programs, files, and settings. Originally the button was

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actually labeled system, but users didn't want to click on it in Microsoft's usability studies

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because it sounded overly technical. So the dev team labeled the button start, stuck it on the taskbar,

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which already showed running programs and the system tray, and the rest is history. I just hope

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they never pull another Windows 8 and decide to take it away from us again. Thanks for watching

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