Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Why Is The Start Menu At The Bottom?”.
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, mac os 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 640×480 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 dislike check out our other videos or leave a comment.
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