Microsoft Bear

Categories: Computing mascots | Microsoft Windows

The Microsoft Bear is the most famous among the mascots of the Windows 3.1 (and later Windows 95) team. It was the teddy bear that one of the senior developers on the team used to carry around. He makes several cameo appearances in Windows:

• A drawing of him was used as the icon for the SETDEBUG.EXE and JDBGMGR.EXE system files. The odd icon gave credibility to the jdbgmgr.exe virus hoax, claiming that the files were part of a virus.^[1] See SULFNBK.EXE for a similar hoax.

• Several internal system functions, although having meaningful internal names, are exported from USER.EXE as BEARNNN (where NNN is the ordinal number of the function) in his honor (and to discourage their use from uncautious third party software developers).

• He stars
  Image:Microsoft Bear 3.1 easter egg.png

  Microsoft Bear appearance in an easter egg
  in two distinct easter eggs in Windows 3.1. The first one^[2] is a reference to a fictitious file named BEAR.EXE, and in the other one^[3] the Bear, along with Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer and Brad Silverberg, presents the nicknames of the Windows 3.1 developers. bradsi, being in charge of Windows production, is listed first (see picture); the three other presenters, billg, steveb, and t-bear, appear together in "Special Thanks", the last section of the list.

By the time of Windows 95, the Bear had been in pretty bad shape, and he ceded his role to Bunny and later Piglet, the two other Windows 3.1 team mascots.

References

• "Backstory on Bear and friends". From Raymond Chen's blog "The Old New Thing". URL accessed on September 26, 2005.

Notes

1. ^  "F-Secure's page about the SETDEBUG.EXE/JDBGMGR.EXE hoaxes." Accessed September 26, 2005.
2. ^  "Description of first easter egg at eeggs.com." Accessed September 26, 2005.
3. ^  "Description of second easter egg at eeggs.com." Accessed September 26, 2005.