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Through The Steve Ballmer Looking Glass
Class Act Dynamo writes "I was browsing for a video clip I saw the other day, and I came across this clip from 15 years ago of Steve Ballmer pitching windows 1.0 in a television commercial. All I can say is WOW. Apparently, there was a big demand for integrating "LOTUS 1-2-3 with Miami Vice." You'll understand when you see the clip." Let it not be said that Microsoft has no sense of humor.
I believe I speak for everyone when I say..
.
"That explains SO much."
"All I can say is WOW." very...apt statment.
"Apparently, there was a big demand for integrating 'LOTUS 1-2-3 with Miami Vice.'" no crap? I mean....whoa!
"$500 dollars? $1000 dollars?" . .
You're right. I can no longer say that MS has no sense of humor.
Oh how I wish that was a false statment...I mean, it even goes along with the new goatse.
Billy G will personally steal your idea AND take over your company!
Let it not be said that Microsoft has no sense of humor.
:-)
But that's not funny!
-Aaron
My name is Aaron Landry, and I approve this message.
I saw this, like, 15 years ago.
Judging from the way my XP machine behaves, they still have yet to reach that 1.0 milestone... :)
According to this commercial, it was priced at $99, now if you want a vintage copy of M$ Windows 1.0, its $200+. Take a look on ebay.
I clicked on that wile browsing from my throne (laptops with wireless connections = the new newspaper folded under the arm) and essentially saved myself from pissing all over myself.
Sound waves should be free!
There are at least a dozen of these videos floating around, some starring Bill & Steve together. They were made for the amusement of the employees and played at the yearly company meetings.
... look at their product linueup. :)
sigs are like a box of chocolates, they all suck remove the underscores to email me
I saw this vid about ten years ago. Ballmer didn't make it for use on TV -- it was shown at an internal Microsoft sales-team meeting. You know -- pump 'em up. Monkeyboy could do well selling used cars, methinks. Just the sort of person who can take a mediocre systems-software company and turn them into a globe-trotting monopoly.
The crazy talking head on the television asked me several times how much i thought it was worth. I kept saying "nothing" but he just kept talking. Crazy man. im scared.
--- Caffeine is directly responsible for some of my greatest ideas, and some of my most embarrassing moments...
$99... same price as XP Home Edition I believe.
Which also still has Reversi.
The coolest voice ever.
And I cannot even begin to explain how much happier you are for that fact.
Works great in Windows Media Player. I guess that's what you get for trying to save $99.
Putting moderation advice in your
You fiends! After watching Balmer in this horrible commercial I was forced to push a 30 watt soldering iron through each of my corneas. I will never see again thanks to this slashdot article!!!
... and in the DRM, bind them.
It's good to see Microsoft did at least one appearance on TV without Windows Crashing.
I don't get it.
Slashdot posts a story with a link that goes (almost) directly to the file. And then it's 5 minutes later and the server happily crunches over a hundred kilobytes per second.
Now either eBausmworld knows how to put up a content server, or slashdot just lost its edge.
The video had been on that site for many years. So now that some random guy came across the video, he puts it on slashdot and it makes it to the front page. What's the need? Slashdot is a *news* site.
Only old Koreans use Windows 1.0
Except in Nebraska.Weird that I saw this here on Slashdot today. I was just looking at it earlier today, when I was cleaning up some of my files, and chuckling to myself about it.
The best part is when he mentions that it has a clock.
WWJD.... for a Klondike bar?
The clip was included in Robert X. Cringely's Triumph of the Nerds series on PBS in 1996. It was as funny then as it is today.
Chip H.
Since you live in nebraska you got the crappy version of windows. If you had lived anywhere else you would know that 1-2-3 was bundled. Guess you really missed out on the deal.
I tried for 5 years to come up with a clever sig...only to realize that I am not clever.
the 1.0 release plays it just fine. Either that or the latest mplayer should be able to handle it. WMV's kind of a moving target, you've got to constantly update your software to play it....
Oh, and Totem and xine use the same back end (xine-lib) so if one can't play it, the other won't (unless you've got something screwy going on where they're using different library paths). Just a heads up....
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
What's even worse is that this will get reposted sometime this next week. It'll go right inbetween the third repostings of "Sony Admits Error" and "Deep Inside the Cell Architecture".
Someone start a goddamn poll on which editors need to be fired.
What, so we can complain about the lack of a Cowboy Neil option?
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
I really fail to see how this is News for Nerds or Stuff that Matters. It's just as bad as Bill Gates in 1983 Teen Beat Magazine.
Editors, can we have a Childish Microsoft Bashing section so I can filter this crap from my frontpage?
There's a progman.exe in XP sp2, (\windows\system32\progman.exe) but I can't get the thing to run. I've used progman.exe in ME before. It's been updated with each release of windows and is probably kept for legacy purposes.
I've got my doubts as to the legitimacy of the video, however, this could have been made for the tradeshow circuit, instead of the television circuit. Trade shows have been known to have slightly off-kilter advertisements in there, such as parodies of TV commercials, and this would fit in fairly nicely.
Marxism is the opiate of dumbasses
Actually, there are tens of thousands of worms and viruses out there. Several thousand unique worms and viruses (when you exclude variants).
No, not all of them run on Windows, but most of them.
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
MOUNT TAPE U1439 ON B3, NO RING
That's because /. is trying to ease everyone into their new section: Slashdot Retro.
It's super cool - it has 15 year old news, coverage of IBM PC jr. and all the dupes you could ever want... from more than a decade ago!
Think of it as Easy Listening for the blog generation - we aren't getting any younger you know.
Why not take their money selling them ads on a site where the users will never beleive their hype? OSDN gets money, MS gets nothing. Sounds like a good deal to me.
If anyone hasn't seen Triumph of the Nerds by Cringely, I highly recommend seeing it. It's the best documentary about computing ever made. It offers a historic and insightful view of the people that created the personal computing industry. Cringely interviews everyone from Gates and Jobs to relative unknowns like the creator of the MITS Altair computer.
What really makes it a great documentary is that it's as entertaining as it is interesting. Not an easy thing at all to do given the subject matter but Cringely pulls it off in spades.
Chew: You Nexus, huh? I design your eyes.
Roy: Chew, if only you could see what I've seen with your eyes.
I was around in the 80's. It was my teens and it was in 1984 that I found computing as a hobby. Not too long after that, still in the 80's, I woundup doing work for a trader in one of Chicago's commodity markets and pretty much everyone and their mother used Lotus 1-2-3. Microsoft had "Multiplan" - their answer to Lotus 1-2-3 (the reigning spreadsheet of the day) but no one really cared.
n .p ng
l ic s-info/symbolics.html
In fact, Microsoft's software lineup was incredibly diverse since it was a young company trying to put its hand into every market to shore the perception that they had a hand in anything and everything. Sort of like today except back then companies constituted real competition vs. today where you're practically assured of being roadkill if Microsoft sets its sites on you. There was "Microsoft LISP" (no, I'm not kidding; it was actually another company's product repackaged) and Microsoft even had software that worked on the Commodore 64 home computer. I mentioned Multiplan earlier, Microsoft's spreadsheet, well not only could you buy it for the IBM PC, check out this screenshot of their Commodore 64 version:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:C64_Multipla
Am I rueful? A little bit. Do I miss those days? Not a chance. What you can do today with a home computer vs. back then is night and day. In retrospect it is slightly surprising that things held my attention as they did. The Net, tons of free software (open source and otherwise), powerful desktop computers all were quite some time off. If you thought dialup today is bad, try operating on the common standard of the day, 1200 baud modems, as in 120 characters per second, as in, yes it took several seconds to fill an 80x25 text screen which most people had in the form of MS-DOS (forget GUI desktops, they weren't common place for quite some time to come).
What I so miss however is the the sense that there were lots of great things happening. They're happening today, but the attitude back then was different. For example, you could realistically expect a company to try something "way out there." For example, I was aware of one Chicago trading company (again, commodities markets) had purchased LISP machines to see if it could come up with AI strategies to improve their trading systems:
http://www.sts.tu-harburg.de/~r.f.moeller/symbo
While open source is prevalent today in some circles, companies have moved to a situation where vendor support is an end all, be all when it comes to decision making. They can be risk averse to the point of self-detriment resulting in very staid environments at times. One example of this is the IT department for the state of Texas. A friend who works there told me once that unless some set of software came on the HP-UX CD, forget about using it. For him, this meant forgetting about PERL since it was not shipped on the HP-UX CDs (this was a few years ago). Even my situation today reflects this to a degree. I work at a very large financial institution and Apache is non-existent in our production systems. While internal Apache sites can readily be deployed to share infromation with coworkers Apache on customer facing servers is a no go.
There just seemed to be more variety in what companies might try because the IT market hadn't settled down. While open source is great (something that I personally have great faith in), back then we did not have today's situation where IT like the automotive industry had just a handful of companies owning respective markets, a.k.a., consolidation. As a frame of reference around the turn of the 20th century there were 30+ automotive companies in the USA. By the 30's things had settled down to the "Big Three" that we've known internalized for quite some time. Today Lotus' 1-2-3 is just a memory as are Symbolics machine, the Commodore 64 and many, MANY other things.
-M
PS: Having said that, I have a pretty sweet desktop these days - a 64 bith Athlon system. The things I do today are pretty amazing in and of themselves... thanks to Moore's Law.
You are correct about the wrapper, or "run-time". Excel 2.0 for Windows could boot from DOS, load the Windows 2.0 runtime, then itself.
Every .exe file for 16-bit Windows had a short DOS stub. Some just printed "This program is designed for Microsoft Windows" or the like, but other, more sophisticated stubs looked for win.com somewhere on the PATH and started Windows if possible and fell back to the error message otherwise. I'm guessing that the smaller programs (such as winver, notepad, and calculator) used the short stub that just errored out, while larger programs used a larger stub. Eventually, as Windows 3.x became more widespread, more developers just linked their apps with the short stub out of laziness.
... That was the fscking funniest thing I have ever seen.
The scary thing is that there are ads of the same quality on late night television that are flogging off refurbished PC's with "Pentium 2 power" for only $599. And they even include Windows 95 and a modem. (So you too can be part of a bot net).
I recently picked up 5 Pentium 2 computers headed for the dump. I am thinking on upgrading my Pentium 166 gateway and servers. If anyone wants one I'll sell it for only $598.
it is only after a long journey that you know the strength of the horse.
Anywho, I'm not surprised how the first feature they pimped was Lotus 1-2-3 support, as Lotus 1-2-3 was the "killer app" of the day. In fact, there are bugs in Excel that were put their purposely to allow for true Lotus 1-2-3 integration.
I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.
progman.exe in Windows XP is just a stub to intercept DDE calls and process launches for Explorer, typically for older Windows 3.x programs that were written to depend upon its presence.
The number of appcompat hacks, workarounds, et al is really very staggering. Linus has the benefit of just changing something and telling everyone to fuck off when their stuff breaks. Microsoft has paying customers that don't take kindly to the same sort of treatment.
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
Yep - It's currently up on Torrentspy.com.
I don't know who posted it, but it's there - not too many seeds though.
progman.exe in XP exists mainly to provide a DDE bridge so legacy programs' installers can put shortcuts in the start menu using the old (win3.1) API.
http://albinoblacksheep.com/flash/sellswindows.php
There's a flash version, which should work a bit better on linux than a WMV.
Besides, Ebaumsworld is terrible >.>
I take it all back. Whatever Ballmer's getting paid, he's earned it. Cripes. I wonder how many more pieces of embarrassing, early-career moments are out there, their stars secretly hoping they are lost forever, but in fact just waiting to surface on the vast expanse of the Internet... ...enough to support Compfused, et al, it seems.
If this guy walked into our office (ad agency), there is no way he would get a decent ad. We would certainly try, but how can you work with the "NOOOOOO....IT'S ONLY $99!!!!" mentality, not to mention a complete lack of any artistic sensibility? If you wonder why Microsoft's products looked like hell for the past 20 years (pre-XP) now you know. Gawd that's awful, even for internal use. Just because something is internal doesn't mean it has to be complete crud.
How old are you? I ask because you appear to be blissfully ignorant of the hundreds of DOS boot-sector viruses which spread themselves around long before the widespread adoption of the Internet. Let's also not forgot the rash of Visual Basic macro viruses which were common for a short while back in the mid to late nineties. They didn't rely on a network to spread either.
windows wasn't an OS back then, just something that ran atop MS-DOS.
the normal viruses of that day spread through boot sectors and piggybacking on dos programs - and were plentiful enough. there's no 'MAYBE' about it.
ambulance...
and are we talking about viruses or worms anyhow?
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
You misunderstand my argument. I was not arguing that the guy from London and the guy from Liverpool must sound exactly the same. Far from it. My point was that even though there are clear and well defined distinctions, multiple accents (or fruits) may be justifiably lumped together based on their similarities.
It is plainly not the case that these accents are "completely different". They are after all all speaking the same language. Even if your well trained ear finds the comparison ludicrous, an untrained ear won't pick up on those differences.
For example. To a trained apple eater a Red Delicious is "completely different" from a Granny Smith. One's sweet, the other's tart. One's mealy, the other is firm. Yet any 5 year old can tell they're both apples.
So yes, the OP was ignorant when he said "british accent", but there's nothing wrong with that. There's so much information in the world that everyone is ignorant about almost everything. Have you ever complained about a help-desker with an indian accent? Did it ever occur to you that in a country as big and as old as india there will be many different dialects and accents? Can you distinguish between a Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Colombian, and Chilean accents? Can you tell which borough a New Yorker is from just from his accent? No? Well, that's ignorance.
But it's not stupidity. Stupidity is an inability to understand things. Like the fact that distinct things can have similarities.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
This is why i believe "flamebait" moderation should be +/-0, rather than -1.
Why?
A very good point can be very controversial, or against the grain. Why should that be punished?
What, are the geeks trying to conform to something?
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
The same language? Have a listen to a glaswegian, and see what you think then.