161–170 of 394 posts
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It's quite flickery. I don't remember TV/video being that bad in 96.
Presumably it was the tape that degraded over the decades (perhaps stuffed in a box, moved from house to house, thought of as junk until they had the idea to post it on the internet)
The vertical hold going as in the featured article was more of a 60s/70s thing in my memory.
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Kind of related to the last few seconds of the news clip - Feb 14 1996 "Zoo Gorilla Gives Birth In Seattle" - I imagine visitation for the new baby would come around a month and a half after birth. https://www.spokesman.com/stories/1996/feb/14/zoo-gorilla-gi...
Had to remove the /1, but good find. That does seem to put the right timeframe -- and with confirmation they're real presenters too. It's not a matter of finding a c. 25 year old clip from the news to base a fake on, it would be finding one from about March-May 1996 (which itself would be amazing to have for no reason), and then replace it. I'm leaning more to "this is real", but it's astounding there's no reference…
Thanks, fixed.
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Remember that the prank preceded the mainstream web, and MS PR clearly went to great lengths to cover it up. I don't think the internet was "remembering everything" yet at that point
Usenet would have, there would be mentions on a pro or anti (mainly anti) microsoft group about it. It was 1996, not the stone age Google has lost a lot of old posts from those days, but I'd be surprised if it would have lost all of them.
Is there any reason to believe that this actually happened? Conveniently, it was published on April 1st. The story itself would be a great April Fools' prank. :)
I feel for the poor staff in those retail stores trying to work out what this product was that wasn't scanning while you've got a customer at your register getting more annoyed by the second.
Yeah; not sure how to work around that. They could have put a common, inexpensive SKU on it. Perhaps for a pencil or something known to be at stock at the retailers, and also likely to have loose inventory controls. (So, they end up with 10 extra pencils when they do inventory at the end of the month; not exactly a disaster for anyone involved.)
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Kind of related to the last few seconds of the news clip - Feb 14 1996 "Zoo Gorilla Gives Birth In Seattle" - I imagine visitation for the new baby would come around a month and a half after birth. https://www.spokesman.com/stories/1996/feb/14/zoo-gorilla-gi...
Had to remove the /1, but good find. That does seem to put the right timeframe -- and with confirmation they're real presenters too. It's not a matter of finding a c. 25 year old clip from the news to base a fake on, it would be finding one from about March-May 1996 (which itself would be amazing to have for no reason), and then replace it. I'm leaning more to "this is real", but it's astounding there's no reference…
Why? It wasn't nationwide, it was local. They said a few hundred boxes on shelves for less than 24hrs.
The only people to know would be people seeing two 60 sec local news clips. Info didn't spread the same back then as it does now.
Again, not proof that it happened, but also not a shock that if it happened there aren't records of it.
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I can't find anything in Google to confirm "Microsoft Coffee" except for this site, discussion of it on Reddit 13 hours ago. Its choice not to display any information older than the attention span of a cracked out chipmunk is one of the main reasons I stopped using Google.
you don't do google justice. They are fully capable of displaying very outdated information. As an example, i recently wanted to look up election results from a certain country, a day after. Google decided to show me some tired, old news snippets from elections in 2015. "stale as buns" is my phrase of choice.
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This is a good example of how human language is ambiguous. You should read it as in the worst case in prison and in the best case fired.
No, we have tone and punctuation to disambiguate the two interpretations here. Parent commenter interpreted correctly. If the grandparent’s intention was otherwise, they should have used a comma.
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True that. The reason for this is simple. Stock price. Investors would wine around, price could move. It is all about money today: serious business.
I think it's deeper - and more insidious - than that. People with no sense of humor, or even awareness of their lack of sense of humor, have clawed their way into positions of real power. They used to just run the parent-teacher council and try to get TV shows cancelled, but now they've moved on to control nearly every aspect of our lives. And their power is growing.