MS

I heard that if you play the Windows NT 4.0 CD
backwards, you'll get a satanic message. But the most
frightening thing is that if you play it forward, it
installs NT 4.0!

To the top

"Windows Diana"

Microsoft announced that they are to rename
Windows 98 "Windows Diana".
They expect that it too will be superficially attractive,
consume lots of resources and crash horribly.

To the top

Windows 2000

The following are new Windows messages that are under
consideration for the planned Windows 2000:

1.Smash forehead on keyboard to continue.
2.Enter any 11-digit prime number to continue.
3.Press any key to continue or any other key to quit.
4.Press any key except... no, No, NO, NOT THAT ONE!
5.Press Ctrl-Alt-Del now for IQ test.
6.Close your eyes and press escape three times.
7.Bad command or file name! Go stand in the corner.
8.This will end your Windows session. Do you want to
play another game?
9. Windows message: "Error saving file! Format drive now? (Y/Y)"
10.This is a message from God Gates: "Rebooting the world. Please log off."
11.To "shut down" your system, type "WIN."
12.BREAKFAST.SYS halted... Cereal port not responding.
13.COFFEE.SYS missing... Insert cup in cup holder and press any key.
14.CONGRESS.SYS corrupted... Re-boot Washington D.C? (Y/N)
15.File not found. Should I fake it? (Y/N)
16.Bad or missing mouse. Spank the cat? (Y/N)
17.Runtime Error 6D at 417A:32CF: Incompetent User.
18.Error reading FAT record: Try the SKINNY one? (Y/N)
19.WinErr 16547: LPT1 not found. Use backup. (PENCIL & PAPER.SYS)
20.User Error: Replace user.
21.Windows VirusScan 1.0 - "Windows found: Remove it? (Y/N)"
22.Welcome to Microsoft's World - Your Mortgage is Past Due...
23.If you are an artist, you should know that Bill Gates owns you and
all your future creations. Doesn't it feel nice to have security?
24.Your hard drive has been scanned and all stolen software titles
have been deleted. The police are on the way.

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Microsoft Sues Bandai Over Tamagotchi

Redmond WA, (AP).

   Microsoft (MSFT) has announced a 54 million dollar lawsuit
against Tomagotchi maker, Bandai. Microsoft is claiming that
the Tomagotchi (the Japanese electronic pet that's all the rage
with the kids) is an infringement of its intellectual property.
   Microsoft spokesperson, Erik Loregard stated "Software that needs
constant, even hourly attention, or else it dies? Sounds like
Windows to me. This is clearly an infringement on our technology".
   The Bandai company spokesman refused to comment on the suit.

To the top

A Customer Claim

Customer: "I'm running Windows '95."

Tech: "Yes."

Customer: "My computer isn't working now."

Tech: "Yes, you said that."

To the top

Three Women

Three women are sitting in a bar talking about their love lives.

The first one says, "My husband is an architect. When we make love it has
power, it has form, it has function. It's incredible!"

The second one says, "My husband is an artist. When we make love it has
passion, it has emotion, it has vision. It's wonderful!"

The third woman sighs and sips her margarita, then says, "My husband works
for Microsoft. When we make love, he just sits at the end of the bed and
tells me how great it's going to be when it gets here."

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Bill Gates and Satan

The US Justice Department - unable to sentence Bill Gates
to any meaningful economic fine decided that his punishment
would be more severe - and sentenced him to eternity in Hell.

Satan greets him: "Welcome Mr. Gates, we've been waiting for
you. This will be your home for all eternity. You've been
selfish, greedy and a big liar all your life. Frankly releasing
Windows 95 two years early, would by itself, have landed you here.
But enough of that.

"You've arrived on a day when I'm in a good mood, so I'll
be generous and give you a choice of three places in which
you'll be locked up forever."

Satan takes Bill to a huge lake of fire in which millions
of poor souls are being tormented and tortured. He then takes
him to a massive coliseum where thousands of people are being
chased about and devoured by starving lions.

Finally, he takes Bill to a tiny room in which there is a
beautiful young woman with an alluring look on her face,
at a table on which there is a bottle of the finest wine
To Bill's delight, he sees a PC in the corner.

Without hesitation thinking he outsmarted the devil,
Bill says "I'll take this option."

"Fine," says Satan, allowing Bill to enter the room.
Satan then locks the door.

   As Satan turns around, he bumps into Lucifer. "That was
Bill Gates!cried Lucifer. "Why did you give him the best
room in the house?"
   "That's what everyone thinks" snickered Satan.
   "The vintage bottle of wine you see - It has a hole in it."
   "That Beautiful young lady - She doesn't"
   "What about the PC?"
   "Oh, If you look carefully, you'll see that it crashed!"
laughed Satan. "And it's missing three keys,"
   "Which three?"
   "Control, Alt and Delete."

To the top

That Was a Demo

Bill Gates dies when a stack of defective Windows95 software
collapses and crushes him. He finds himself in purgatory, being
sized up by St. Peter.

   "Well, BG, this one's a tough call. I don't know whether to send
you to Heaven, for helping society by putting a computer in almost
every home in America, or Hell, for creating Windows95. I'm going
to do something I've never done - I'm going to let you decide where
you want to go. In fact, I'll let you visit both places before you decide."
   "Great", says Bill, "Where should I go first?"
   "I'll leave that up to you", says St. Pete.
   "OK", says BG, "Let's try Hell first".
   So Bill went to Hell. It was a beautiful, sandy beach with crystal
clear waters, sunny skies, and many bikini-clad, very attractive women
running around, playing in the water, and getting him beer from a
bottomless cooler. Bill was very pleased.
   "This is great!" He told St. Peter. "If this is Hell, I REALLY
want to see Heaven".
   So they went to Heaven. Heaven was a place high in the clouds,
with angels drifting about, playing harps and singing. It was nice,
but not as nice as Hell. BG thought for a minute, then said "St. Pete,
I really think I'd prefer Hell". "Fine" retorted St. Peter, "As you wish".
So Bill Gates went to Hell. Two weeks later, St. Peter decided to check
on Gates, to see how things were going. When he got there, he found Bill
shackled to awall, surrounded by hot flames in deep caves, being burned
and tortured by demons.

"How's everything going?" asked St. Peter. Bill responded,his voice filled
with anguish "This is awful! This is nothing likethe place I first visited!
Where's the beach? Where's the sun? WHERE'S THE WOMEN?"
"Oh", said St. Peter, "That was a demo"

To the top

Bill Gates in the Heaven

Bill Gates died and, much to everyone's surprise, went to Heaven. When
he got there, he had to wait in the reception area.

Heaven's reception area was the size of Massachusetts. There were
literally millions of people milling about, living in tents with
nothing to do all day. Food and water were being distributed from the
backs of trucks, while staffers with clipboards slowly worked their
way through the crowd. Booze and drugs were being passed around.

Fights were commonplace. Sanitation conditions were appalling. All in
all, the scene looked like Woodstock gone metastatic.

Bill lived in a tent for three weeks until, finally, one of the
staffers approached him. The staffer was a young man in his late
teens, face scarred with acne. He was wearing a blue T-shirt with the
words TEAM PETER emblazoned on it in large yellow lettering.

"Hello," said the staffer in a bored voice that could have been the
voice of any clerk in any overgrown bureaucracy. "My name is Gabriel
and I'll be your induction coordinator." Bill started to ask a
question, but Gabriel interrupted him. "No, I'm not the Archangel
Gabriel. I'm just a guy from Philadelphia named Gabriel who died in a
car wreck at the age of 17. Now give me your name, last name first,
unless you were Chinese in which case it's first name first."

"Gates, Bill." Gabriel started searching though the sheaf of papers on
his clipboard, looking for Bill's Record of Earthly Works. "What's
going on here?" asked Bill. "Why are all these people here? Where's
Saint Peter? Where are the Pearly Gates?"

Gabriel ignored the questions until he located Bill's records. Then
Gabriel looked up in surprise. "It says here that you were the
president of a large software company. Is that right?" "Yes."

   "Well then, do the math chip-head! When this Saint Peter business
started, it was an easy gig. Only a hundred or so people died every
day, and Peter could handle it all by himself, no problem. But now
there are over five billion people on earth. Jesus, when God said to
'go forth and multiply,' he didn't say 'like rabbits!' With that large
a population, ten thousand people die every hour. Over a
quarter-million people a day. Do you think Peter can meet them all
personally?"
   "I guess not."
   "You guess right. So Peter had to franchise the operation. Now, Peter
is the CEO of Team Peter Enterprises, Inc. He just sits in the
corporate headquarters and sets policy. Franchisees like me handle the
actual inductions." Gabriel looked though his paperwork some more, and
then continued. "Your paperwork seems to be in order. And with a
background like yours, you'll be getting a plum job assignment."
   "Job assignment?"
   "Of course. Did you expect to spend the rest of eternity sitting on
your ass and drinking ambrosia? Heaven is a big operation. You have to
pull your weight around here!" Gabriel took out a triplicate form, had
Bill sign at the bottom, and then tore out the middle copy and handed
it to Bill. "Take this down to induction center #23 and meet up with
your occupational orientator. His name is Abraham." Bill started to
ask a question, but Gabriel interrupted him. "No, he's not that
Abraham."

Bill walked down a muddy trail for ten miles until he came to
induction center #23. He met with Abraham after a mere six-hour wait.
"Heaven is centuries behind in building its data processing
infrastructure," explained Abraham. "As you've seen, we're still doing
everything on paper. It takes us a week just to process new entries."
"I had to wait three weeks," said Bill. Abraham stared at Bill
angrily, and Bill realized that he'd made a mistake. Even in Heaven,
it's best not to contradict a bureaucrat. "Well," Bill offered, "maybe
that Bosnia thing has you guys backed up."

Abraham's look of anger faded to mere annoyance. "Your job will be to
supervise Heaven's new data processing center. We're building the
largest computing facility in creation. Half a million computers
connected by a multi-segment fiber optic network, all running into a
back-end server network with a thousand CPUs on a gigabit channel.
Fully fault tolerant. Fully distributed processing. The works."

   Bill could barely contain his excitement. "Wow! What a great job! This
is really Heaven!"
   "We're just finishing construction, and we'll be starting operations
soon. Would you like to go see the center now?" "You bet!"
   Abraham and Bill caught the shuttle bus and went to Heaven's new data
processing center. It was a truly huge facility, a hundred times
bigger than the Astrodome. Workmen were crawling all over the place,
getting the miles of fiber optic cables properly installed. But the
center was dominated by the computers. Half a million computers,
arranged neatly row-by-row, half a million ....

.............. Macintoshes ........ all running Claris software! Not a

PC in sight! Not a single byte of Microsoft code!

The thought of spending the rest of eternity using products that he
had spent his whole life working to destroy was too much for Bill.
"What about PCs???" he exclaimed. "What about Windows??? What about
Excel??? What about Word???"

"You're forgetting something," said Abraham. "What's that?" asked
Bill plaintively.

"This is Heaven," explained Abraham. "We need a computer system that's
heavenly to use. If you want to build a data processing center based
on PCs running Windows, then ................... GO TO HELL!"

To the top

You Are in a Helicopter

A helicopter was flying around above Seattle yesterday when an
electrical malfunction disabled all of the aircraft's electronic
navigation and communications equipment.

Due to the clouds and haze, the pilot could not determine the
helicopter's position and course to steer to the airport.
The pilot saw a tall building, flew toward it, circled, drew a
handwritten sign, and held it in the helicopter's window. The
pilot's sign said "WHERE AM I?" in large letters.

People in the tall building quickly responded to the aircraft,
drew a large sign, and held it in a building window. Their sign
said "YOU ARE IN A HELICOPTER."

The pilot smiled, waved, looked at his map, determined the course to
steer to SEATAC airport, and landed safely.

After they were on the ground, the co-pilot asked the pilot how the
"YOU ARE IN A HELICOPTER" sign helped determine their position.
The pilot responded "I knew that had to be the MICROSOFT building
because, similar to their help-lines, they gave me a technically
correct but completely useless answer."

To the top

The Trouble Must Be At Your End!

One of Microsoft's finest techs was drafted and sent to boot camp.
At the rifle range, he was given some instruction, a rifle, and
bullets. He fired several shots at the target. The report came from
the target area that all attempts had completely missed the target.

The Microsoft tech looked at his rifle and then at the target again.
He looked at the rifle again, and then at the target again. He put
his finger over the end of the rifle barrel and squeezed the trigger
with his other hand. The end of his finger was blown off, whereupon
he yelled toward the target area: "It's leaving here just fine. The
trouble must be at your end!"

To the top

Microsoft to Buy The U.S Government

REDMOND, Wash. - Oct. 21, 1997 -- In direct response to accusations made
by the Department of Justice, the Microsoft Corp. announced today that
will be acquiring the federal government of the United States of America for
an undisclosed sum. "It's actually a logical extension of our planned
growth", said Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, "It really is going to be
a positive arrangement for everyone". Microsoft representatives held a
briefing in the oval office of the White House with U.S. President Bill
Clinton, and assured members of the press that changes will be "minimal".
The United States will be managed as a wholly owned division of Microsoft.
An initial public offering is planned for July of next year, and the
federal government is expected to be profitable by "Q4 1999 at latest",
according to Microsoft president Steve Ballmer.
In a related announcement, Bill Clinton stated that he had
"willingly and enthusiastically" accepted a position as a vice
president with Microsoft, and will continue to manage the United States
government, reporting directly to Bill Gates. When asked how it felt to
give up the mantle of executive authority to Gates, Clinton smiled and
referred to it as "a relief". He went on to say that Gates has a "proven track
record", and that U.S. citizens should offer Gates their "full support and
confidence". Clinton will reportedly be earning several times the $200,000
annually he has earned as U.S. president, in his new role at Microsoft.
Gates dismissed a suggestion that the U.S. Capitol be moved to
Redmond as "silly", though did say that he would make executive
decisions for the U.S. government from his existing office at Microsoft
headquarters.

Gates went on to say that the House and Senate would "of course" be
abolished.

"Microsoft isn't a democracy", he observed, "and look how well
we're doing". When asked if the rumored attendant acquisition of Canada
was proceeding, Gates said, "We don't deny that discussions are taking
place".

Microsoft representatives closed the conference by stating that
United States citizens will be able to expect lower taxes, increases in
government services and discounts on all Microsoft products.
About Microsoft: Founded in 1975, Microsoft (NASDAQ "MSFT") is the
worldwide leader in software for personal computers, and democratic
government. The company offers a wide range of products and services
for public, business and personal use, each designed with the mission of
making it easier and more enjoyable for people to take advantage of the full
power of personal computing and free society every day.
About the United States: Founded in 1789, the United States of
America is the most successful nation in the history of the world, and has
been a beacon of democracy and opportunity for over 200 years. Headquartered in
Washington, D.C., the United States is a wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft
Corporation.

"Think different"

To the top

Microsoft Windows

Three engineers are riding in a car: an electrical engineer, a chemical
engineer, and a Microsoft engineer. Suddenly the car stalls and stops by
the side of the road. The three engineers look at each other with
bewilderment, wondering what could be wrong.

The electrical engineer, not knowing much about mechanics, suggests:
"Let's strip down the electronics of the car and try to trace where a
fault might have occurred."

The chemical engineer, not knowing much about electronics, suggests:
"Maybe the fuel has become emulsified and is causing a blockage
somewhere in the system."

The Microsoft engineer suggests: "Why don't we close all the windows,
get out, get back in, open the windows again, and maybe it'll work!?"

To the top

Q. Is Windows a virus?

1. They replicate quickly -- okay, Windows does that.

2. Viruses use up valuable system resources, slowing down the system as
they do so -- okay, Windows does that.

3. Viruses will, from time to time, trash your hard disk -- okay,
Windows does that too.

4. Viruses are usually carried, unknown to the user, along with valuable
programs and systems. Sigh.. Windows does that, too.

5. Viruses will occasionally make the user suspect their system is too
slow (see 2) and the user will buy new hardware. Yup, that's with
Windows, too.

So Windows is a virus.

Nope! On the other hand:

1. Viruses are well supported by their authors, are frequently updated,
and tend to become more sophisticated as they mature.

2. Viruses are compact and efficient programs. They take up small disk
spaces but do things much bigger compared to the size. However windows
takes up lots of disk space but don't work comparably.

3. Virus programmers are unknown, whereas windows programmers are known
and give their names at the about menu!

4. Viruses are free but you pay for Windows.

5. Viruses install themselves !

So there! Windows is NOT a virus.

Now, you decide it.

Reasons Why Windows is NOT a virus

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Bill Gates: The World's Smartest Man...

One night, a Delta twin-engine puddle jumper was flying somewhere above New

Jersey. There were five people on board: the pilot, Michael Jordan, Bill
Gates, the Dalai Lama, and a hippie. Suddenly, an illegal oxygen generator
exploded loudly in the luggage compartment, and the passenger cabin began to
fill with smoke. The cockpit door opened, and the pilot burst into the
compartment.

"Gentlemen," he began, "I have good news and bad news. The bad news is that
we're about to crash in New Jersey. The good news is that there are four
parachutes, and I have one of them!" With that, the pilot threw open the door
and jumped from the plane.

Michael Jordan was on his feet in a flash. "Gentlemen," he said, "I am the
world's greatest athlete. The world needs great athletes. I think the world's
greatest athlete should have a parachute!" With these words, he grabbed one
of the remaining parachutes, and hurtled through the door and into the night.

Bill Gates rose and said, "Gentlemen, I am the world's smartest man. The
world needs smart men. I think the world's smartest man should have a
parachute, too." He grabbed one, and out he jumped.

The Dalai Lama and the hippie looked at one another. Finally, the Dali Lama
spoke. "My son," he said, "I have lived a satisfying life and have known the
bliss of True Enlightenment. You have your life ahead of you; you take a
parachute, and I will go down with the plane."

The hippie smiled slowly and said, "Hey, don't worry, pop. The world's
smartest man just jumped out wearing my backpack."

To the top

If Microsoft Built Cars

1. People would get excited about the "new" features in Microsoft
cars, forgetting completely that they had been available in other
cars for many years.

2. Every time they repainted the lines on the road, you'd have to buy
a new car.

3. You could only have one person in the car at a time, unless you
bought a "Car 95" or a "Car NT". But then you'd have to buy more
seats.

4. New seats would force everyone to have the same size butt.

5. The oil, engine, gas and alternator warning lights would be
replaced with a single "General Car Fault" warning light.

6. The airbag system would say "Are you sure?" before going off.

To the top

Bill Gates vs Auto Industry

Bill Gates wanted to look good and impress everyone with his success.

He decided to measure the accomplishments of Microsoft against
General Motors.

The comparison went like this:

If automotive technology had kept pace with computer technology over
the past few decades,you would now be driving a V-32 instead of a V-8,
and it would have a top speed of 10,000 miles per hour.

Or you could have an economy car that weighs 30 pounds and gets
a thousand miles to a gallon of gas. In either case the sticker
price of a new car would be less than $50.

In response to all this goading, GM responds:

"Yes, but would you really want to drive a car that crashes twice a day?"

To the top

If Restaurants Functioned Like Microsoft

Patron: Waiter!

Waiter: Hi, my name is Bill and I'll be your Support Waiter. What
seems to be the problem?

Patron: There's a fly in my soup!

Waiter: Try again, maybe the fly won't be there this time.

Patron: No, it's still there.

Waiter: Maybe it's the way you're using the soup; try eating it
with a fork instead.

Patron: Even when I use the fork, the fly is still there.

Waiter: Maybe the soup is incompatible with the bowl; what kind
of bowl are you using?

Patron: A SOUP bowl!

Waiter: Hmmm, that should work. Maybe it's a configuration
problem; how was the bowl set up?

Patron: You brought it to me on a saucer; what has that to do with
the fly in my soup?

Waiter: Can you remember everything you did before you noticed
the fly in your soup?

Patron: I sat down and ordered the Soup of the Day!

Waiter: Have you considered upgrading to the latest Soup of the Day?

Patron: You have more than one Soup of the Day each day?

Waiter: Yes, the Soup of the Day is changed every hour.

Patron: Well, what is the Soup of the Day now?

Waiter: The current Soup of the Day is tomato.

Patron: Fine. Bring me the tomato soup and the check. I'm running
late now.

[Waiter leaves and returns with another bowl of soup and the check.]

Waiter: Here you are, Sir. The soup and your check.

Patron: This is potato soup.

Waiter: Yes, the tomato soup wasn't ready yet.

Patron: Well, I'm so hungry now, I'll eat anything.

[Waiter leaves.]

Patron: Waiter! There's a gnat in my soup!

The check:

Soup of the Day . . . . . . . . . . . ........$ 5.00

Upgrade to newer Soup of the Day. . . .$ 2.50

Access to support . . . . . . . . . . .......$10.00

Bug in the soup........included at no extra charge

(will be fixed with Tomorrow's soup of the day)

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Microsoft TV Dinner Installation Instructions

You must first remove the plastic cover. By doing so
you agree to accept and honor Microsoft rights to
all TV dinners. You may not give anyone else a bite
of your dinner (which would constitute an infringement
of Microsoft's rights). You may, however, let others
smell and look at your dinner and are encouraged to
tell them how good it is.

If you have a PC microwave oven, insert the dinner
into the oven. Set the oven using these keystrokes:
\mstv.dinn.//08.5min@@50%heat// Then
enter:ms//start.cook_dindin/yummy\|/yum~yum:-)gohot#cookme.

If you have a Mac oven, insert the dinner and press start.

The oven will set itself and cook the dinner.

If you have a Unix oven, insert the dinner, enter the
ingredients of the dinner (found on the package label),
the weight of the dinner, and the desired level of cooking
and press start. The oven will calculate the time and
heat and cook the dinner exactly to your specification.

Be forewarned that Microsoft dinners may crash, in
which case your oven must be restarted. This is a
simple procedure. Remove the dinner from the oven
and enter ms.no.&*%*.good/tryagain\again/again.&*%*.
This process may have to be repeated. Try unplugging
the microwave and then doing a coldreboot. If this
doesn't work, contact your hardware vendor.

Many users have reported that the dinner tray is far
too big, larger than the dinner itself, having many
useless compartments, most of which are empty. These
are for future menu items. If the tray is too large
to fit in your oven you will need to upgrade your
equipment.

Dinners are only available from registered outlets,
and only the chicken variety is currently produced.
If you want another variety, call Microsoft Help and
they will explain that you really don't want another
variety. Microsoft Chicken is all you really need.

Microsoft has disclosed plans to discontinue all
smaller versions of their chicken dinners. Future
releases will only be in the larger family size.
Excess chicken may be stored for future use, but
must be saved only in Microsoft approved packaging.

Microsoft promises a dessert with every dinner
after '98. However, that version has yet to be
released. Users have permission to get thrilled in
advance.

Microsoft dinners may be incompatible with other
dinners in the freezer,causing your freezer to
self-defrost. This is a feature, not a bug.
Your freezer probably should have been defrosted anyway.

To the top

A Brief History of Computing

In the early 1980s most major computer manufacturers agreed to stop
forcing people to learn a bunch of different operating systems, and
instead adopt a single, uniform, standardized operating system so
absurdly non-intuitive that nobody could learn it. This system was
called MS-DOS.

The MS, of course, stood for Microsoft, the company that was
started by the brilliant software genius Bill Gates. Gates is a
very rich man today -- Forbes magazine estimates that he's worth
more than the entire O.J. Simpson defense team combined -- and do
you want to know why? The answer is one word: versions.

To understand what I mean by versions, let's consider an analogy
involving cars. Suppose you've purchased a new car, and you
notice that, although it does move, it goes very slowly, is
extremely hard to steer, and makes a loud scraping sound. You
study this problem for a while, and you conclude that the most
likely cause is that the car does not have any front wheels. So
you mention this to the salesperson, and he tells you that you
have Version 1.0 of the car, but that Version 1.1 will be out
shortly, and it will feature wheels in front as well as back. So
when Version 1.1 comes out, you upgrade, which means you pay
money. But you're happy, because now you have a car with a
complete set of wheels, and you're totally satisfied with it from
the moment that you pull out of the dealer's lot to the moment,
about 90 seconds later, when you drive into a public fountain.
This is when find out that brakes are not scheduled to appear
until Version 1.3.

This is very much the way MS-DOS worked. The original version,
1.0, did virtually nothing except cause the computer screen to
say:

That was it. Really. Ask anybody who used MS-DOS computers back
then. You'd turn them on, and there'd be this A: staring back at
you. What did it mean? Why A:? Why not some other letter, or even
an actual word? And what was the little pointy thing for? We
will never know the answer. It's one of the many mysteries of MS-
DOS.

So, anyway, people would turn on their computers, and stare at
the A: for awhile, scratching their heads, and then finally
they'd try typing something after the A:, perhaps something
like:

A: HELLO

But here was the crucial thing about MS-DOS Version 1.0: No
matter what you typed in, it would respond as follows:

BAD COMMAND OR FILE NAME

Then, with no further explanation, it would go back to:

There were rumors -- never verified -- that if you typed in
certain secret code words, you could get some response other than
A: or BAD COMMAND OR FILE NAME, but if there were such code words,
only Bill Gates ever knew what they were. So mainly what this
version of the MS-DOS was used for -- millions of person- hours
were spent on this -- was trying to get it to do something,
anything. If you were to travel back in time and look at the
average person's computer screen during that era, you'd see what
lookeunusually hostile employee of the Department of Motor Vehicles:

A: HELLO

BAD COMMAND OR FILE NAME

A: HELP

BAD COMMAND OR FILE NAME

A: DO SOMETHING!

BAD COMMAND OR FILE NAME

A:RUN A PROGRAM, DAMMIT!

BAD COMMAND OR FILE NAME

A:**** YOU

BAD COMMAND OR FILE NAME, ***HOLE

This was pretty much all people did with MS-DOS Version 1.0. So
you can imagine how excited everybody was when Microsoft came out
with Version 1.1, which had a whole new capability. In addition
to doing this:

It would sometimes also do this:

A new letter! This was very, very exciting news for those of us
in the computer geek world. We all immediately upgraded to
Version 1.1. Of course, no matter what we typed, it still
answered BAD COMMAND OR FILE NAME. But we felt renewed hope.

Over the next few years, Microsoft continued to come out with
new improved, versions of MS-DOS, featuring a constantly
expanding repertoire ofincomprehensible and/or scary screen
messages, including:

NON-SYSTEM DISK OR DISK ERROR

INVALID SWITCH

PATH NOT FOUND

WARNING! ALL DATA WILL BE LOST!

And just about everybody's all-time favorite:

ABORT, RETRY, FAIL?

We loyal Microgeeks faithfully upgraded every time a new version
came out, until finally, somewhere around Version 3.7, we had
reached the point where we could use MS-DOS to actually run
programs on our computers, and Bill Gates had reached the point
where he had approximately 217 personal jet airplanes.

I should point out that, while all this [MS-DOS masochism] was
going on, there was another kind of computer developing, in a
parallel universe. This was the Apple, and it operated on an
entirely different concept, which was: A regular human could use
it. You simply turned it on, and immediately, just like that, you
could do stuff with it. It had little pictures on the screen, and
a little mouse that made a pointer move to the picture you
wanted; even a child could understand this. For many years, while
we MS-DOS people were typing insanely obscure instructions like:

dir c:\abcproj\docs\lttrs\sales\apr\*.*

the Apple people were simply aiming their little mouse pointers
at little pictures and going click.

In short, the Apple was far easier to use. So the vast majority
of us serious computer users rejected it. As I noted in the
introduction, the main reason we have computers is so we can be
tormented by them. We don't want some wussy user-friendly
computer: We want a challenge.

That's why, to this very day, Apple is not considered by us
cyberwonks to be a truly serious computer. It is viewed as a
computer that is popular mainly with your flaky or artsy-fartsy
type of individual -- your artist, your poet, your beatnik, your
flower-arranger, your heroin addict, your Barry Manilow. We
serious users pride ourselves on wrestling with openly hostile
computers that are running on an operating system from the proud,
incomprehensible Microsoft tradition. That operating system, of
course, is Windows.

As I write these words, the computer world is still
reverberating with the excitement surrounding the introduction of
Windows 95, which replaced Windows Version 3.11, which replaced
Windows 3.1, which replaced Windows Version 3.0, and so on
backward to the original Windows Version 1.0, which did nothing
except put a colorful Windows logo on the screen along with a
message that said OUT OF MEMORY.

Windows 95 represented a major step forward in the sense that it
was virtually nothing like any of the earlier Windows versions
and nobody had any idea how to use it. Naturally it was hugely
popular. Everybody wanted it; Microsoft was getting bulk orders
from rainforest-dwelling tribes that didn't even have
electricity.

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