In the modern office landscape, computer literacy is typically a job requirement, as the vast majority of tasks an employee is expected to do are prohibitively difficult and increasingly impossible without the benefit of information technology.
Whilst in the modern day the solutions to technical issues and user confusion can be found with IT services in Colchester, in the early days of office computers this was far from the case.
A good example of this is that whilst Microsoft Windows 1.01 was first released to the public in 1985, it took until 1990 and the release of Windows 3.0 for the operating system and the concept of the graphical user interface to take off in the office.
Before this, Apple’s Lisa computer was an infamous commercial failure, and whilst the Apple Macintosh 128k was successful, this success was primarily found in the education market. Other popular GUI systems were purely designed for home use such as the Atari TOS and AmigaOS.
However, in a world where people either relied on typewriters or text-based operating systems, the concept of intuitively clicking on icons on a screen was unusual and quite unnerving for many early users, as was using a new computer peripheral known as a “mouse”.
Microsoft had come up with a solution that was revolutionary and controversial at the same time, primarily because it was not necessarily a computer application.
An Unusual Teaching Tool
Designed by intern Wes Cherry during the summer of 1988, Microsoft’s plan to train millions of office workers to use Windows was a virtual adaptation of a card game called Klondike.
Microsoft Solitaire was meant to be a carrot used to help users get used to the operating system via the use of a relatively simple game familiar to many workers. By dragging and dropping the cards and clicking the deck to draw more cards, users grew more familiar with the system.
The same principle was used with the later release Minesweeper, which relied on the use of both the left and right mouse buttons, but both games would prove to have both strong supporters and significant critics within the business world.
Productivity Vacuum
Solitaire was until its removal with Windows 10, one of the single most used applications on Microsoft Windows, but whilst it did improve worker dexterity with the new graphical user interface, the consequence was that was especially addicting.
Many entire industries had reports that significant working hours were lost by employees playing a few rounds of one of the games that came with the computer.
This included a lot of employees at Microsoft itself including, most infamously, Bill Gates, who became so fixated with Minesweeper that he had to get the program removed from his computer to do any work, instead using then-president Mike Hallman’s computer to play.
Solitaire ultimately served its purpose very quickly, getting millions of users accustomed to what became the standard way of interacting with a computer for the vast majority of businesses.
Most business editions of Windows stopped including the game and on Windows 10, it is an additional download with a paid component, but that does not stop the important impact it had on getting offices ready for what was then the future and is now our present.
