Speaking of getting into Microsoft events, some buddies and I registered with Microsoft as OEM system builders when we were in high school. We would drive to Redmond and attend these events talking about various new hardware and software and would leave with bags full of swag and they had awesome Raffles giving away some expensive shiny new hardware, which we would win quite often shockingly.
We had finally heard about the Microsoft store on campus, and had heard about the super discounted software. Turned out you had to be an employee. We were crushed because retail copies of Win2k were expensive for high schoolers. So we sat out in front of the store with signs "will work for cheap Microsoft software." Finally this girl came by and asked what we were doing, she was an intern or a new hire or something like that not much older than us, still in college. She went into to store and came out with boxed copies of Win2k Workstation for $20 a pop for us. We were stoked and tried to give he some cash, but she was just happy to help us out.
Those were some good times. I wonder if stuff like that still happens today.
My story of getting into a Microsoft event: in late 2000, Microsoft was rebranding MSN with the butterfly logo and they paid groups of inline skaters in NYC to dress up in custom purple velour body suits with wings to skate around Manhattan and generate buzz (heh) about the new MSN.
Well, there happened to be a computer show at the Javits Center so we skated there, convinced a security guard we were with Microsoft (hey, eight skaters in velour MSN body suits must be with Microsoft, right?), and skated onto the show floor. About fifteen minutes later security figured out we weren't part of the show and kicked us out. (We weren't supposed to keep the butterfly outfits but some people did. I didn't keep mine, but I do have photos that prove it really happened.)
Late 80s, it was fairly easy to get into Apple's developer program. I wrote up a "business plan" describing an Apple ][ program I wrote (which was real) and laid out the plans to port it to the Mac (which was not real).
In return you got a mountain of documentation and CDs, and the magic carbon-paper form that let you buy one Apple device a year at a 50% discount. That's how I got my MacSE for college.
I did feel bad because for a few years afterward my mom was routinely contacted by Cupertino asking how the program was coming along.
It was also incredibly easy to crash the Consumer Electronics Show. Probably still is. Just a fake business card printed up and mailed in. I was there for the Newton intro, that was something.
This is much better than my approach of acquiring obsolete versions of competitors' software to qualify for then-generous "competitive upgrades" that were often themselves available at steep discounts when the next version dropped.
For instance, there was not much of a market for the PCjr version of Lotus 1-2-3 in the early '90s when I used it to qualify for the $20 competitive upgrade to Excel 4.0 I found in the bargain bin at a local electronics retailer after Excel 5.0 released, which of course qualified me for even less expensive (not than $20) version upgrades in the future, not only to Excel, but to the full Office suite.
The real hack wasn't registering as an OEM builder. It was discovering that a cardboard sign and a little persistence could get you Windows 2000 for $20
of course not you are describing something that cant be more millenial, the mix of technical knowledge, hacking and social hacking, the group heist mentality the NEED to bypass microsoft security...
> Remember infrared file sharing? Of course you don’t.
I was at a karaoke bar in Japan the other year and noticed the remote for the karaoke system had an IR port. Next time I brought my Sony Clie and sure enough, it still worked to let you send photos and doodle on them to display on the karaoke screen. Looked up the system, it was from 2012 (but was still kept up-to-date with new songs). https://kalleboo.com/microblog/posts/113510755577334826.html
I am amazed at how he recalls events, issues, incidents etc. with such detail decades after they happened. I can’t seem to remember things well that happened 6 months ago.
Does anyone have a system they use to help with such rich recollection?
I have what I like to call a semiphotographic memory. I can abstractly remember the positions, shapes, colors and numbers of things extremely well. I can remember sequences of words very well. I can strongly associate it with sensory memories.
But I have some weaknesses with it, like temporal trouble. It's hard to natively remember dates and sequences of events. I can strongly remember what the pieced together moments were like, but it's difficult to recall "Did that happen before X or Y?"
With things like that I need to remember, I visualize a timeline or a graph in my head or draw it out and take a mental snapshot of that. I've also found that's why I'm a "visual" person when it comes to things like project management.
I've imagined a lot of memory management for others must be like that: You find your innate abilities of mental organization, and use it to map the world outside to the world inside. I imagine it looks very different for everyone.
Way back I had concept for short story around someone with perfect memory, but as a result they experience everything as presently happening, no memory fading to sort temporal experience
I wonder if he tells these stories to people outside of the blog.
There are a few events in my life that merit the story being told to people; friends at the pub, during conversations with colleagues at lunch, etc, because they're amusing or unbelievable or whatever.
After a while, you may not remember the event so much, but you do remember the story.
Myself and a friend treated ourselves to a bunch of Marylin Manson shows early in 1997 because we were into that. Sometimes, we'd have assigned seats. Once or twice, we elected to sit on the balcony by ourselves and watch everything from afar. One time, in Harrisburg, I wanted to be in the pit but I did not have a ticket for that.
I decided I was going to sneak onto the floor anyway.
So I positioned myself to be ready for the lights to drop as the opener, Rasputina, finished up and I hopped over the bar and tried to disappear into the crowd on the floor below.
It didn't work. I was instantly spotlighted by a man with a flashlight. Someone else grabbed my shoulder and corrected me by indicating rather forcefully that my intended destination was not the mosh pit, but was instead the entrance gate at the back of the arena.
They didn't kick me out, but once we got back to that quieter area I was informed that since I didn't have a ticket to be in the pit, then I was definitely not going to be in the pit. I was further made aware that I would not be trying this kind of thing again.
So I sauntered back to the assigned seat that I started from and watched the show from there, where some usher became increasingly livid at the despondent teenagers who were smoking cigarettes at a rock show in the 1990s (but who was apparently powerless to do anything about it).
The show was good. I'd seen it before, and I would also see it again.
---
That was almost 30 years ago. Certainly, some aspects have been lost to time.
Was it Harrisburg? Maybe it was Pittsburgh. It probably wasn't Wheeling -- that show was differently-memorable because I had Gideon's bible in my pocket and people were getting arrested for throwing snowballs at the Christians who were holding a vigil across the street, with candles, as they prayed for our souls. It might have been Wheeling anyway.
And the usher? I definitely remember issues between smokers and an usher. But maybe that guy was at a show somewhere in Ohio instead.
Did I make my move during Rasputina, or maybe it was some other opener? Was Rasputina even at that show? (Maybe it was unrelated to the opening act?)
I do know that I hopped over a barrier and immediately got sent to the back, and that's the important part of the story that I wanted to convey. The rest is just context.
And the trick is to just fill in enough believable details about that context that the story works. (It's even easier if you believe those details yourself.)
I mean, I can't remember what I had for dinner 6 months ago, but if I snuck into a presentation and anyone famous was announced as the surprise guest, I think I would remember that! I would assume most people do not recall everything with this much detail, just the (ha) memorable things.
> Remember infrared file sharing? Of course you don’t.
I am much younger than Raymond Chen, but the generation of Lego Mindstorms I used in early elementary school had us load programs onto the robot using infrared. I'd never really thought about how that worked, or why it didn't just use a USB cable directly rather than a USB cable to infrared beacon to robot, until just now.
After the great Steam-ening of 2027 - where 80% of the Windows Pro market collapses, I look forward to a retro throwback w2k inspired Windows Classic to make a return without AI and advertising..
Ahh, who am I kidding. When are we getting a W2K "clean room" modern build by some bored kids on dad's AI spend
Huh, now I remember a 90's or early 00's watch that has data, and the way to upload data onto it was by running a special Windows program that would flicker an area of the screen black and white. You'd point the face of your watch to it and the flickering had data encoded onto it.
Timex DataLink. I had the Ironman Triathlon branded model of those, used the hell out of it in high school.
The screen flickering trick also only worked on CRTs under Windows 3.1/9x, so if you had a laptop, any other system with a LCD, or were running NT you had to get a special dongle that hooked up to your serial port and would blink a LED that you had to hold in line with the watch's sensor.
Supported in MS Schedule+ 7.0 included with Office 95.
Very magical to hold your watch up to the CRT monitor, see the monitor go black and flash a bunch of white lines for a few seconds and then look at your wrist to view the downloaded info.
But it was only letters and numbers so the routine got old fast.
Could be a bit finicky to get a successful transfer as well.
I used one for a few years. It was a pretty neat thing for its time.
IIRC it didn't work with a CRT using MS operating systems after Windows 2000 due to driver changes or something.
But Timex also a sold little single-LED blinkenbox that plugged into an RS-232 port that would do the trick. That was intended for computers with LCD screens like laptops, but it worked with later operating systems too.
I don't know if it's the same technology, but I had a microcontroller toy as a little kid where you'd 1) write the programs on your computer (or in my case, type them in from the tutorial book, without actually comprehending any of it) and then 2) transfer the compiled program to the device itself via (IIRC) this little puck-shaped thing with a blinking red light. It was pretty cool, I wonder if I still have it stashed away anywhere.
I mostly remember infrared transfers in the context of beaming contacts between PalmPilots. It was pretty fast for that, and actually, much more reliable than modern AirDrop.
I was going to ask "Where on Android", an app like Binary Eye can generate a QR code with the actual data, but Google's Quick Share indeed uploaded the data and generated a download URL.
Speaking of getting into Microsoft events, some buddies and I registered with Microsoft as OEM system builders when we were in high school. We would drive to Redmond and attend these events talking about various new hardware and software and would leave with bags full of swag and they had awesome Raffles giving away some expensive shiny new hardware, which we would win quite often shockingly.
We had finally heard about the Microsoft store on campus, and had heard about the super discounted software. Turned out you had to be an employee. We were crushed because retail copies of Win2k were expensive for high schoolers. So we sat out in front of the store with signs "will work for cheap Microsoft software." Finally this girl came by and asked what we were doing, she was an intern or a new hire or something like that not much older than us, still in college. She went into to store and came out with boxed copies of Win2k Workstation for $20 a pop for us. We were stoked and tried to give he some cash, but she was just happy to help us out.
Those were some good times. I wonder if stuff like that still happens today.
My story of getting into a Microsoft event: in late 2000, Microsoft was rebranding MSN with the butterfly logo and they paid groups of inline skaters in NYC to dress up in custom purple velour body suits with wings to skate around Manhattan and generate buzz (heh) about the new MSN.
Well, there happened to be a computer show at the Javits Center so we skated there, convinced a security guard we were with Microsoft (hey, eight skaters in velour MSN body suits must be with Microsoft, right?), and skated onto the show floor. About fifteen minutes later security figured out we weren't part of the show and kicked us out. (We weren't supposed to keep the butterfly outfits but some people did. I didn't keep mine, but I do have photos that prove it really happened.)
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Late 80s, it was fairly easy to get into Apple's developer program. I wrote up a "business plan" describing an Apple ][ program I wrote (which was real) and laid out the plans to port it to the Mac (which was not real).
In return you got a mountain of documentation and CDs, and the magic carbon-paper form that let you buy one Apple device a year at a 50% discount. That's how I got my MacSE for college.
I did feel bad because for a few years afterward my mom was routinely contacted by Cupertino asking how the program was coming along.
It was also incredibly easy to crash the Consumer Electronics Show. Probably still is. Just a fake business card printed up and mailed in. I was there for the Newton intro, that was something.
This is much better than my approach of acquiring obsolete versions of competitors' software to qualify for then-generous "competitive upgrades" that were often themselves available at steep discounts when the next version dropped.
For instance, there was not much of a market for the PCjr version of Lotus 1-2-3 in the early '90s when I used it to qualify for the $20 competitive upgrade to Excel 4.0 I found in the bargain bin at a local electronics retailer after Excel 5.0 released, which of course qualified me for even less expensive (not than $20) version upgrades in the future, not only to Excel, but to the full Office suite.
Fun, reminds me of high schoolers on the Win95 beta: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6145147
The real hack wasn't registering as an OEM builder. It was discovering that a cardboard sign and a little persistence could get you Windows 2000 for $20
of course not you are describing something that cant be more millenial, the mix of technical knowledge, hacking and social hacking, the group heist mentality the NEED to bypass microsoft security...
> Remember infrared file sharing? Of course you don’t.
Hey, I played with that when I was approximately 8 years old! Also: wireless printing via infrared, instead of those huge parallel printer cables.
I loved beaming stuff between Newtons as a kid.
I love thinking about the idea of sending uber low bitrate memes during some boring meeting.
Palm Pilots! Brad Templeton once sent me his business card that turned out to be "You Have Been Hacked." Very funny.
One of my teammates was fond of sending "I'm not wearing pants." between Palm Pilots
I used to transfer files (photos mainly) by IrDA with my classmates between our phones in the mid-00s.
I was a bit older, but it was a great feature pre-WiFi. PDA transfers over IRDA, too!
Honestly, it's such a weird statement to make. I'd guess that most of his audience remembers infrared file sharing.
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> Remember infrared file sharing? Of course you don’t.
I was at a karaoke bar in Japan the other year and noticed the remote for the karaoke system had an IR port. Next time I brought my Sony Clie and sure enough, it still worked to let you send photos and doodle on them to display on the karaoke screen. Looked up the system, it was from 2012 (but was still kept up-to-date with new songs). https://kalleboo.com/microblog/posts/113510755577334826.html
> but the iPhone runs its LIDAR on IR for autofocus and just taking a photo of this process kills the transfer
I think you could just use the front facing camera.
Raymond Chen is one of the great treasures of the web.
I am amazed at how he recalls events, issues, incidents etc. with such detail decades after they happened. I can’t seem to remember things well that happened 6 months ago.
Does anyone have a system they use to help with such rich recollection?
I have what I like to call a semiphotographic memory. I can abstractly remember the positions, shapes, colors and numbers of things extremely well. I can remember sequences of words very well. I can strongly associate it with sensory memories.
But I have some weaknesses with it, like temporal trouble. It's hard to natively remember dates and sequences of events. I can strongly remember what the pieced together moments were like, but it's difficult to recall "Did that happen before X or Y?"
With things like that I need to remember, I visualize a timeline or a graph in my head or draw it out and take a mental snapshot of that. I've also found that's why I'm a "visual" person when it comes to things like project management.
I've imagined a lot of memory management for others must be like that: You find your innate abilities of mental organization, and use it to map the world outside to the world inside. I imagine it looks very different for everyone.
Way back I had concept for short story around someone with perfect memory, but as a result they experience everything as presently happening, no memory fading to sort temporal experience
Years later tried to write out, maybe didn't hold together https://serprex.github.io/w/Ad%20nauseum%20ad%20nauseum
You write it down and if you don’t remember you just make up something plausible.
Isn’t that the Wave Collapse Algorithm in a nutshell?
But you must remember at least some events from a long time ago with a lot of details.
And if you wrote a blog, these would be the events you would write about. You obviously won't write a blog post about events you don't remember.
It is selection bias, it is not indicative of the ability of Raymond Chen to remember all little details.
I wonder if he tells these stories to people outside of the blog.
There are a few events in my life that merit the story being told to people; friends at the pub, during conversations with colleagues at lunch, etc, because they're amusing or unbelievable or whatever.
After a while, you may not remember the event so much, but you do remember the story.
He has at least several years worth of articles queued up, some of the details could be made up, selection bias and more.
Myself and a friend treated ourselves to a bunch of Marylin Manson shows early in 1997 because we were into that. Sometimes, we'd have assigned seats. Once or twice, we elected to sit on the balcony by ourselves and watch everything from afar. One time, in Harrisburg, I wanted to be in the pit but I did not have a ticket for that.
I decided I was going to sneak onto the floor anyway.
So I positioned myself to be ready for the lights to drop as the opener, Rasputina, finished up and I hopped over the bar and tried to disappear into the crowd on the floor below.
It didn't work. I was instantly spotlighted by a man with a flashlight. Someone else grabbed my shoulder and corrected me by indicating rather forcefully that my intended destination was not the mosh pit, but was instead the entrance gate at the back of the arena.
They didn't kick me out, but once we got back to that quieter area I was informed that since I didn't have a ticket to be in the pit, then I was definitely not going to be in the pit. I was further made aware that I would not be trying this kind of thing again.
So I sauntered back to the assigned seat that I started from and watched the show from there, where some usher became increasingly livid at the despondent teenagers who were smoking cigarettes at a rock show in the 1990s (but who was apparently powerless to do anything about it).
The show was good. I'd seen it before, and I would also see it again.
---
That was almost 30 years ago. Certainly, some aspects have been lost to time.
Was it Harrisburg? Maybe it was Pittsburgh. It probably wasn't Wheeling -- that show was differently-memorable because I had Gideon's bible in my pocket and people were getting arrested for throwing snowballs at the Christians who were holding a vigil across the street, with candles, as they prayed for our souls. It might have been Wheeling anyway.
And the usher? I definitely remember issues between smokers and an usher. But maybe that guy was at a show somewhere in Ohio instead.
Did I make my move during Rasputina, or maybe it was some other opener? Was Rasputina even at that show? (Maybe it was unrelated to the opening act?)
I do know that I hopped over a barrier and immediately got sent to the back, and that's the important part of the story that I wanted to convey. The rest is just context.
And the trick is to just fill in enough believable details about that context that the story works. (It's even easier if you believe those details yourself.)
I mean, I can't remember what I had for dinner 6 months ago, but if I snuck into a presentation and anyone famous was announced as the surprise guest, I think I would remember that! I would assume most people do not recall everything with this much detail, just the (ha) memorable things.
Careful. Consider that many of Raymond's writings are actually unverifiable.
It’s only fitting that the peak Windows was introduced by Patrick Stewart.
Of course I remember IR file sharing! And contact beaming from Palm devices.
> Remember infrared file sharing? Of course you don’t.
Multiplayer snake on properly lined-up Nokia phones for me.
So many comments about infrared and the old-school tech they used it with and I'm over here remembering making two Furby's talk to each other.
Sharing ringtones via IR was The Thing To Do back in the late 90s/00s, before copyright issues began making their noise.
I recall being dismayed that BT was so unreliable for so long that it was often STILL better to send files via IR.
It took 27 years to get the full Windows 95 event uploaded. Hopefully the Windows Server 2000 event will be showing in 2027.
> Remember infrared file sharing? Of course you don’t.
I am much younger than Raymond Chen, but the generation of Lego Mindstorms I used in early elementary school had us load programs onto the robot using infrared. I'd never really thought about how that worked, or why it didn't just use a USB cable directly rather than a USB cable to infrared beacon to robot, until just now.
I wonder if Jordan Schlansky influenced the author in various ways.
Jokes aside, do Linux distros ever get such launch events?
> Remember infrared file sharing? Of course you don’t.
I don't, but I do remember using my Siemens ME 45 as a GPRS modem through its infrared port and an IR USB dongle.
Of course I remember IrDA.
IrDA was the way to transfer midi ringtones to my Nokia back then. It was so cool to have it on a laptop.
After the great Steam-ening of 2027 - where 80% of the Windows Pro market collapses, I look forward to a retro throwback w2k inspired Windows Classic to make a return without AI and advertising..
Ahh, who am I kidding. When are we getting a W2K "clean room" modern build by some bored kids on dad's AI spend
> The sketch demonstrated infrared file sharing and other mobile scenarios. Remember infrared file sharing? Of course you don’t.
Oh hell yes I do. Dog slow but at least it worked decently well, something I can't say about Bluetooth.
I remember waiting for IR file sharing. It was SLOW.
Huh, now I remember a 90's or early 00's watch that has data, and the way to upload data onto it was by running a special Windows program that would flicker an area of the screen black and white. You'd point the face of your watch to it and the flickering had data encoded onto it.
Since it's 2026, googling brings me nothing... had to ask Gemini: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCHHzw4s5W4
Timex DataLink. I had the Ironman Triathlon branded model of those, used the hell out of it in high school.
The screen flickering trick also only worked on CRTs under Windows 3.1/9x, so if you had a laptop, any other system with a LCD, or were running NT you had to get a special dongle that hooked up to your serial port and would blink a LED that you had to hold in line with the watch's sensor.
For those that don’t feel like watching a video, it was the Timex Datalink.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timex_Datalink
Supported in MS Schedule+ 7.0 included with Office 95.
Very magical to hold your watch up to the CRT monitor, see the monitor go black and flash a bunch of white lines for a few seconds and then look at your wrist to view the downloaded info.
But it was only letters and numbers so the routine got old fast.
Could be a bit finicky to get a successful transfer as well.
And transfer bandwidth was pretty low.
I used one for a few years. It was a pretty neat thing for its time.
IIRC it didn't work with a CRT using MS operating systems after Windows 2000 due to driver changes or something.
But Timex also a sold little single-LED blinkenbox that plugged into an RS-232 port that would do the trick. That was intended for computers with LCD screens like laptops, but it worked with later operating systems too.
Bloomberg terminal authentication (screen-sync) works this way too.
Kids also got a toy based off of Timex Datalink - I had one!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8ig2UPjOXQ
... The DSI e-BRAIN is also fully working in timex_datalink_client, which amuses me so: https://github.com/synthead/timex_datalink_client/issues/111
I don't know if it's the same technology, but I had a microcontroller toy as a little kid where you'd 1) write the programs on your computer (or in my case, type them in from the tutorial book, without actually comprehending any of it) and then 2) transfer the compiled program to the device itself via (IIRC) this little puck-shaped thing with a blinking red light. It was pretty cool, I wonder if I still have it stashed away anywhere.
I mostly remember infrared transfers in the context of beaming contacts between PalmPilots. It was pretty fast for that, and actually, much more reliable than modern AirDrop.
I remember IR printing, it was nifty! Had some fun with random public printers and my little HP palmtop…
I loved IR contact/note sharing! It was easy, fast, and reliable. It also worked across different types of phones.
There's still nothing comparable :(
Nowadays, a QR code on one phone, and camera on the other can accomplish data transfer.
Can, but don't. It looks like on Android it creates a temporary link to the VCF file that needs to be downloaded from Google.
I was going to ask "Where on Android", an app like Binary Eye can generate a QR code with the actual data, but Google's Quick Share indeed uploaded the data and generated a download URL.
Fucking enshittification...
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