Windows 95 had a more successful launch. Believe me: I was there for it, and I had to run tech-support for half a dozen friends’ computers at the time, not to mention several family members.
And I had already been running Chicago betas for several months. What a shit show that was…
And these were the days before most people had either a functional Internet connection or any sort of home networking, so any kind of real fix or updates had to come through the sneakernet via floppies.
I was legit working for Dell tech Support when Windows 98 came out, and that really wasn’t so bad. except for the whole USB 2.0 thing…
I was a kid at the time with a pirated copy of W95. I had memorized the W95 license key (wasn’t that difficult but I finally forgot it) because I had to reinstall it so often. I think at least once a month.
I freed up a couple of spare brain cells on that sort of thing back in the day once it was discovered around the schoolyard that Windows 95 (in addition to Office and a couple of other M$ products) would happily accept a CD key of all ones: 111-1111111. I don’t think this was applicable to the OEM versions, though. Windows 98 meanwhile would take a key of 12345-12345-12345, etc.
I still have the Windows 2000 MSDN CD key memorized. From XP onwards, the… alternative… activation methods did not require knowing license keys anymore.
One wonders what it was like to be a member of mankind in an era when all you had to memorize was actually useful information.
Windows 95 had a more successful launch. Believe me: I was there for it, and I had to run tech-support for half a dozen friends’ computers at the time, not to mention several family members.
And I had already been running Chicago betas for several months. What a shit show that was…
And these were the days before most people had either a functional Internet connection or any sort of home networking, so any kind of real fix or updates had to come through the sneakernet via floppies.
I was legit working for Dell tech Support when Windows 98 came out, and that really wasn’t so bad. except for the whole USB 2.0 thing…
I was a kid at the time with a pirated copy of W95. I had memorized the W95 license key (wasn’t that difficult but I finally forgot it) because I had to reinstall it so often. I think at least once a month.
17195-OEM-0001875-01864
Yeah, I reinstalled that much that I remember it.
I freed up a couple of spare brain cells on that sort of thing back in the day once it was discovered around the schoolyard that Windows 95 (in addition to Office and a couple of other M$ products) would happily accept a CD key of all ones: 111-1111111. I don’t think this was applicable to the OEM versions, though. Windows 98 meanwhile would take a key of 12345-12345-12345, etc.
I still have the Windows 2000 MSDN CD key memorized. From XP onwards, the… alternative… activation methods did not require knowing license keys anymore.
One wonders what it was like to be a member of mankind in an era when all you had to memorize was actually useful information.
Me too, at work, on a dozen machines. ALL THIRTY TWO FLOPPY DISKS.
Yeah, I’m pretty sure I had a w98 and xp key memorized at one point
I’m pretty sure I still have an index card somewhere with an XP key on it. I very nearly had it memorized.