A closer look

Microsoft Solitaire was not included in Windows 3.0 just for fun, but as a stealthy psychological training tool to teach computer illiterate boomers how to use a mouse. Back in 1990, the concept of clicking, dragging, and dropping items on a screen was completely alien to office workers who had spent their entire lives using typewriters and command-line interfaces. By addicting them to a digital card game, Microsoft successfully tricked millions of employees into developing the precise fine motor skills required to navigate a graphical user interface. The brilliant educational ploy quickly backfired when corporate productivity nosedived globally, as millions of people realized that aimlessly stacking digital cards was vastly superior to making actual spreadsheets