Microsoft Coffee | The Internet's Weirdest Mystery
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- Опубликовано: 1 апр 2024
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On April Fools Day of 1996, a group of Microsoft employees played a practical joke on their hometown of Seattle. They decided to create boxes for a fictitious product called "Microsoft Coffee" and placed them on store shelves all around the city. The incident sparked tons of confusion and even lead to angry reactions from Microsoft and Bill Gates, who placed a ban on any future pranks from the company that did not get approved through them first.
However, no archives or records of this story ever occurring currently exist, outside of a Medium article written by one of the pranksters allegedly involved. But all the evidence that this article provides seems to show that this may be much more than just some silly internet hoax. What is the true and full story to the mysterious tale to Microsoft Coffee?
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Yo, I was thinking about your “Windows: Microsoft’s Biggest Mistake” video, and thought it would be nice to see a video about the Xerox 8010, the first OS with a GUI, I’d really love to see that, and think it would be very interesting.
squares
SationNquid
Nationsquid if you’re ever gonna do another video like this can you please make it about that “impostor” Burger King new story in Pittsburg? It’s very obscure and I’m not even sure if it’s real or if it was just a weird hoax thing. This was also around 2014 and only one news station covered it.
Huh
The fact that you (understandably) put a disclaimer that 1996 was an era of "physical media" when if you wanted to have new software on your computer you'd have to "go to the store and buy it" because this might be an entirely foreign concept to a good chunk of your audience makes me feel the most 31 I've ever felt.
Makes me feel the most 17 I've felt, because I literally lived at the end of physical media. :((((
As someone 32 years old, I feel this comment in my soul
Hey buddy you were a literal toddler in '96
Man, same age x)
@@Antleredangelbunphysical media lasted awhile after that and kids watch what their parents do. Someone could absolutely remember what it was like
Bill Gates is sitting on your couch drinking MS Coffee as he watches this.
This wins at RUclips comments for the month!
The m$ coffee topic is real...
pro tips, remove one E.. he didnt research this well, heh. iykyk
And hes watching it from his UFO as well
😂
Sitting on his couch? 😂
I know people tend to believe “the internet never forgets” but it’s really not true. Information is lost all the time, and only the people who were there can vouch for it. Over the last 20+ years, I've seen so many events vanish from the web without a trace. Sure, there’s The Wayback Machine, but it’s quite flawed and only takes sporadic snapshots. There’s a bunch of snapshots of my own website, and it constantly jumbles instances of it around, so that each snapshot has elements in it that in reality were years apart.
The truth is, the internet is not the great library of babble we think of it. It’s closer to human memory, slowly degrading, rewriting, and forgetting old information.
Even if you know it exists SOMEWHERE on the archive, you wouldn't know where.
I tried finding a concert I participated in, in 2007.
There were even CDs distributed from the rehearsals
as well as a camera team recording it.
Nothing. No trace of it left.
HOWEVER I did manage to find a VHS,
as well as contact one of the people in charge and they were able to give me a copy of the audio tracks in question.
A lot of the times, I suppose, it's just knowing how to contact the right people, assuming you still know their name and they're still alive.
... first is aol buddylist.
next is myspace friend lists and photos.
next is gmail this year. 😮
THIS
@@Littlefighter1911 id love to hear the tracks
It didn't forget until Trump 2017, and then the 2020 flu situation.
I think Google nerfed 90% of the internet over the past 4 years.
It's a possibility that it was a prank by the news anchors themselves. That's why it's not a nationwide thing, with no national notice. An April's Fool's joke by the anchors in one small market.
Seattle is not really a small market, and KOMO TV-4 certainly has the resources to pull off a prank like this - I'm 99% sure the channel themselves put the video together, which explains why the story isn't in any newspapers. Messaging the news anchors would easily settle the "mystery".
It is a digital red herring.
@@TokyoXtreme What q contrast to now, when people write a whole article, based on yt video
That's what I am thinking as well. It could even be an advertisement for the product disguised as a news segment that was just not released to the public since Microsoft sent the legal team after them. If the identity of this news anchor is known, then couldn't he just be contacted for information?
@@TokyoXtreme right. It's likely nothing more than an unreleased paid advertisement. I think this just comes down to a product launch fail that was stopped by Microsoft and the people who were trying to launch this product are now trying to create some sort of mystery about it.
Well I think it's clear what happened: aliens came and took all the copies of Microsoft Coffee, probed everyone's butts, then erased all our memories of both events.
Oh I remember the butt stuff
If a pot of coffee was brewed at a Microsoft campus, would that make it Microsoft Coffee?
Microstrong coffee
microdose estrogen
They have cafe's called megabites
Every cup, wait 10 minutes for download.
Microsoft coffie is c#
getting your couch stolen is crazy
ong
he stole it
@@officialgoldenbros his brother stole it as a prank
Wanted to make it clear that this was just a joke. I'm just moving. Thanks for watching! :)
keep up the work man i love your videos@@nationsquid
Maybe the real Microsoft Coffee was the friends we made along the way
💀
You're right...
That is so corny
“coach was right, guys, we just had to believe in Microsoft Coffee!”
Maybe the real jojomations2596 was the friends we made along the way
"What if this April fools prank was never real, but was just an April fools prank itself? Bazinga." - what I wished Nation Squid said.
bazinga ò_Ō
Azingba
Bazinga!
Eww
bosnia herzegovina
Just email that news anchor.
Email both of them.
A good lead, but in all fairness, it wouldn't be unreasonable for them to have forgotten the event and coverage. Could you name what you did at your job 25 years ago?
Although, it's also likely that the news station has a copy of the segment. Maybe asking them is worth a shot?
@@ArsonRabootTrue, but it might still be worth a try. Besides, if they were in on the prank they would almost certainly remember it to this day - unless, of course, they regularly did stuff like that.
mentioning it might be enough to remind them.
Good idea.
@@ArsonRaboottbh i think even showing them the youtube clip itself would be enough to either say "yeah that was me" or "no i dont remember doing that". i really hope we get an answer to this soon!!
This strikes me as someone trying to create a Polybius-like myth centered on Microsoft, but with a disappointing lack of MiB involvement.
I was thinking the same thing 🤣
When Google used to do April Fools, I was excited every year to see what prank they would pull off. After the pandemic started in 2020, Google completely stopped doing April Fool, and so did other tech companies. And that's kinda sad but understandable.
why is that understandable?
Because of an unrelated event, jokes aren't allowed to exist? Humor must be banned?
April 1 being like 2 weeks after the pandemic/lockdowns really hit in the us, and people not really being collectively 'ready' for it quite yet. Not to mention, iirc April 1 was easter
@@TokyoXtremewelcome to the woke generation where even humour is harmful
@@ps5hasnogames55 Need a license for lulz.
11:00 It's very easy to find out.
Ask the broadcasting service.
Usually they keep footage around for a few decades.
And if not some summary.
It happened to us, as recently as 2018: I went to a public party with a couple of friends, and at some point, we headed to the store to get more alcohol, when a large amount of cops arrived to the area, and we decided to leave and headed to my house. That was a Friday, on Monday, the incident was on the newspaper, we even mocked the headline of "more than 200 young people drinking alcohol on the street" and even shared the link (as it was on the internet), this year I told the story to another friend, but I didn't find the link, and I REALLY spent some time looking for it
That is because the internet is the prime ground to manufacture a "year zero" type of deal.
I asked Dave Plummer from Dave's Garage and got this simple response back within minutes. Pretty damning for the story.
I was there in ’96 and sure never heard of it then! And you’d think it’d be the kind of thing you’d hear about :-)
Cheers,
Dave
welp if davepl says that then it's really some elaborate prank
He's an asshole, so I wouldn't be surprised if nobody told him.
This is what is referred to as "Professional Gaslighting"
"Gaslighting" is a term like "ironic" and "iconic": everyone's determined to use it, but no one seems to know what it means.
Gaslighting involves consistently misleading someone to the extent that they start doubting their own perception of reality. It's important to note that this situation differs because, despite Microsoft's past reputation for being unreliable, they haven't explicitly acknowledged the existence of the issue.
@@classicnosh What issue?
@@eadweard. I meant to write software, sorry
@@eadweard. Yep, and no one truly knows what gaslighting is until they’re dating someone who makes it an instrumental part of their personality.
on a random chances that its actually a thing, Microsoft Coffee could be something that keeps the computer awake ignoring the power management system. with that said we actually have Microsoft Coffee in PowerToys, its used to be called Caffeinate, but its now called "PowerToys Awake", and it keeps your screen awaken
It is actually a thing. He missed the research as its buried by this red herring news clip
That's a very reasonable idea for a piece of software, certainly, but not the kind of thing that I'd expect to see sold as a standalone retail product in its own box, even in the '90s. As something packaged in one of Microsoft's Plus! packs for Windows, on the other hand, it would make perfect sense (which is where the whole "PowerToys" concept originated in the first place, wasn't it?).
Today MS is completely woke.
Theres actually Microsoft software called COFEE which is used by police to extract evidence from windows PCs
@@macdaniel6029 damn liberals...
The worst April Fool's prank I ever went through actually happened to A LOT of people IN MY ENTIRE TOWN. Last time April 1 fell on a Friday, the local ATM was modified so as to keep ANY debit card put into it regardless, and anyone who fell for it had to either wait for it to be returned through the mail or, if for some reason they couldn't afford to wait, ask for a new one. The latter would require a small fee. But with my low income, it would NOT be a drop in the bucket for yours truly. So by putting a new twist on the law against stealing (by reinterpreting the word so as to also mean "cause to lose"), I called the bank and basically stuck up for everyone affected. Because of yours truly, NO ONE had to pay the fee that year, though we all still had to wait for Saturday to take out our money AND write a check for it, which, sadly, couldn't be avoided. I would still like to know what kind of BIFF would do something like that. I hope they don't even have a job right now and do also not have a disability, as they certainly deserve neither
biff?
@@HungerGamesFan88 Yes, as you likely thought, I WAS referring to Biff Tannen of Back To The Future. THAT IS the kind of prank he would pull, though I should admit I was only scratching the surface according to the trilogy
@@jeffreyseay7707 oh lmao i thought it was an acronym
Wouldn't the new card be sent out through the same mail service and at the same timescale? Also here in the UK you can lose and block your card and request a new card as many times as you're unlucky enough to need to and to the best of my knowledge they never charge a fee for the new one.
@@MrDannyDetail This is the USA and those things cost money just as they would where you live. Everything costs money everywhere. And in this case, it happened en masse. Therefore, I knew I had to be the town hero and have them force the town Tannen to pay the entire collective bill
I was so worried this video would be a joke I had to look it up lmao. I love these videos so I'm glad this isn't just misinfo.
I can see this being a very minor but real thing because the public probably had close to zero interaction with the product before it was pulled, with only a handful of store employees handling the boxes
in 1996 widescreen TV's were not mainstream. Broadcasts were still done in 4:3 format.
Not only not mainstream, they didn't exist at all. Maybe a few prototypes.
The video looks stretched though, so this is probably a moot point
@@macdaniel6029 Flat screens didn't exist then, but there were extremely heavy widescreen cathode ray tube televisions even in the 90s even in the UK, so they must presumably also have existed in the US too.
@@macdaniel6029they absolutely existed lmao
An explanation could be made from how current Google is outright worthless when it comes to finding slightly obscure information. The net has grown too much and left Google behind, which is now only able to check small, mainstream parts of it. There likely are forums, blogs or news articles that are currently online that discuss Coffee or that UFO sighting, but you don't have a way to find them.
Yeah but they're the default on most devices so they have near-monopoly power on that. That's only slightly related it's just something that bugs me.
Couldn't this be fixed by using another search engine?
Also quite confusingly, there was a tool called Microsoft Cofee. (Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor)
It was a USB stick full of tools for digital forensics that they provided to law enforcement.
I thought this video was about that tool. I have one in my collection of oddware.
I thought this video would be about that. Really disappointed
If this is a hoax (and I'm tending towards that conclusion), the name might have been picked deliberately to make search engines confuse Coffee for Cofee and make it harder to disprove the story.
@@xXHashassinXx I thought this video was going to be about an early version of C#, Microsoft's alternative to Java
Why do I feel like the news station was the one doing the prank, and some guy is just riding the coattails of an actual video clip by claiming the store prank even happened
I'm skeptical of the "VHS artifacts".
Ditto. I don't recall ever seeing "artifacts" like that on a VHS tape. Those look more like vertical-hold issues (roll & flutter) on an old CRT television. 🤔🤔🤔
@@FriedAudio Distortions and vertical sync issues can happen with damaged vhs tape. Back in the 90s my brother once got his hands on a p*rno tape and tried to switch out the actual physical tape with some other cartridge (cassette?) so that our parents wouldn't find out but when he put it in the vcr there was all sorts of color distortion, audio weirdness, and vertical syncing issues. Of course, I was a kid and was just trying to get a glimpse past the distortions because booba but I remember fairly clearly... those were some formative distortions, I tell you what.
@@FriedAudioyep that's what I'm thinking as well. Maybe if the tape got remastered it could look much better because the information is still there.
I've seen a _lot_ of VHS artifacting in my time, especially from longplays and superlongplay tapes. This is plausible, but doesn't look quite right to my eye. Of course, standards and framerates were different in the US, perhaps 60FPS makes a tape flicker a little differently
Well, someone from the area can probably tell whether the _4_ logo resembles any station ident of the time in the area. Besides, don't American station call signs always start with either a _K_ or a _W_ so that just a _4_ would not be what any local TV station would even be _allowed_ to be called?
Given that Seattle is at least nowadays west of the Mississippi, local station call signs would have to start with a _K._ Now I don't live in the U.S., but would a station called something like _KIV-TV_ have an ident consisting of just the number _4_ like in the clip?
I had the same thing happen to me when I was a kid around 2009-2010. There was a bright light and sound of a crash, it woke me and my family up out our sleep. Literally had us and neighbors go outside their house to see where it came from. We honestly thought it was a plane at first but the sounds and lights were so oddly different it couldn’t have been, nothing was found. It was never reported in the news and this happened in San Diego, California. Me and my family still talk about it to this day.
Obvious.. that is a military area.
hm. so its aliens. aliens made the coffee.
Give that news anchor vid to captain dissillusion and he will debunk it in 2 mins
Isnt Microsoft COFFEE also the name of the tool they developed for law enforcement agencies? I feel like I'm going crazy here not seeing anyone else mention this.
Smartest person here.
Yes, Microsoft COFEE (Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor).
came to the comments to say the same. i remember when people on the internet caught wind of the existence of that software. I remember that you had to install it on a USB stick, and then it either did diagnostics or cracking or both. I specifically remember people saying "never stick a USB drive you don't own into your computer, in case it has something like this on it" and also "even if your computer is off, don't ever leave it unattended, or else a hacker could plug this in, turn your computer on, and they basically own your computer now. I don't even know entirely what it did, I just know that it was scary stuff and that only three-letter agencies were legally allowed to have it. I'm sure similar stuff exists for macOS and Linux, but given Microsoft's history of gladly adding backdoors to their OS for the NSA to exploit, it definitely added to the list of reasons I eventually stopped using Windows for personal computers...
I just saw it mentioned with one comment between yours and it. 😂
Microsoft Hot Coffee
It was Rockstar all along
What was Coffee supposed to _do,_ exactly?
I thought the same. By the looks of it, Java (programming language) was only a year old. I presume it was popular enough by then. And this was Microsoft’s attempt to aggressively bring out something similar to compete with ‘Java’. Which, given Microsoft’s track record in those days, was probably believable 😂
@@sabni8668 They did, it's called C#.
@@sabni8668The funny thing is that Microsoft Java exists. It's called C#
@@sabni8668 Microsoft for real put out not one but two Java competitors, J++ and J#, of which J++ in particular was a blatant part of MS's embrace, extend, extinguish practice at the time.
In addition to J++ (which was supposed to be an implementation of Java rather than a competitor, but it never passed Sun's compliance tests), ActiveX was often talked about as a Java competitor. It really wasn't much like Java at all, but a lot of early publicity around Java involved the ability to embed Java applets into webpages, and ActiveX was kinda sorta doing the same thing, if you squinted, I guess.
The UFO took the couch.
My family had a PC-store back in the mid to late 90's. When I saw that icon on the thumbnail of this video it felt LEGIT nostalgic and I was looking forward to see what "that software" I barely remember was all about, just to hear it might not even have existed. But it feels eerily familiar to me. However, it is likely because it has the perfect elements that is reminiscent of things that actually existed back then.
Me too, I was sure I had seen that box or icon at some point in the mid-90s!
Yeah, it's BS. Everything provided originates from a single source, no names were revealed, they made an article, a website, a Twitter account and a RUclips channel JUST for this "story".
I'll wait for the rabbit hole RUclipsrs to get on this. They would actually contact the news station and anchors to get to the bottom of this. I kinda wish you had done that instead of just regurgitating the Medium article.
I swear I remember this being a crappy wizard-driven Java Applet IDE/creator for Windows 95/NT 4.0 that made applets that only worked in Internet Explorer and were broken in Netscape. I'm probably thinking of something else, but at the time I was working at a mom-and-pop PC build/repair/resale store in the PNW at the time, and this rings a bell...
Activex
Javabeans
Maybe it's visual j plus plus
This. I want to say M$ bought the wysiwyg ide just after I rolled out a site with it. It was competitive with early flash. The predecessor name escapes me unfortunately but the prior name was also Java-ish.
"Clippy was annoying" How dare you sir.
I can vouch for a few things. I was in high school in the late 90's, and that period was WILD. "Dude, you got a Dell" is forever seared into my brain against my wishes. So I can see something like this happening.
Also, stuff disappears over time. I can remember many things from the past that are just gone. I've lost count of how many times someone will bring something from the time up and I'll remember a forum thread about it, which no longer exists.
But I'll be honest. Something about that news report seems "off". It just looks like something someone made today to look like it was from the 90's.
Just for an example that I just thought of. There are lots of old videos from The Weather Channel on RUclips. As well as a bunch of modern recreations of them. Look at a modern one and then one of the originals. 90's tech and graphics just had a different feel to them that most wouldn't see unless they grew up with it.
But if it is a fake video, it's a well done fake.
I mean, you have to admit, if you were someone trying to break into the film industry, this is genius. You have a video you can show studios and a whole lot of people vouching for how good the effects are. And it’s all about a fairly boring prank that never happened, so you’re not going to set off red flags.
"it's just a prank bro"
The prank:
I was genuinely expecting this to end with you being the person who created the site as an April Fools prank.
It's not impossible. Especially since he hasn't made much effort to really investigate this, and the whole video just serves to promote this story even further with the notion that we can't know if it's real or not.
Dude your videos on this exact sort of random stuff are so awesome. I hope you can continue to upload more often with the same great quality.
I am not understanding...you find this mystery, and the only piece of evidence of a video, you find the news guy from the video, and just go "we'll never know" ...?? this guy would know! ask him??
He might, but I'm sure the dude did hundreds of stories in his time and details can become fuzzy.
Now I'm interested in that UFO story that you mentioned. Time to get in touch with the local news paper?
Can't we just contact those reporters in the video? Check what they have to say?
That would take a layer of research one level above Googling.
Back in those days, Microsoft used to add "express" to the free versions of their commercial software (e.g. Outlook Express, FrontPage Express). I think I will wait for one of those, Microsoft Coffee Express.
They could've called it Microsoft Espresso
about the ufo story. you should go to the library in that area and check the newspaper archives, typically they have em on microfilm and they're well archived. the internet is amazing for research but sometimes you'll have to look elsewhere and dig a bit deeper, and the local library is an insanely good place to start.
I think the best April Fool's joke is when Google announced GMail at the same URL that was previously Garfield Mail.
Because GMail continues to be a joke to this day.
Why don't you try to get in touch with those two news reporters (if they're still kicking)?
And the two networks that are named specifically to see if they have any archival footage
I've lived in WA my whole life and I'm pretty familiar with this station. Keith Eldridge retired in 2022, though I don't recognize the female anchor.
@@KingNikolaishould ring them :)
If it was in any local Seattle news papers, I find it VERY hard to believe that Seattle Public Library has no records whatsoever. That is not a tiny library.
Yeah, his entire dismissal that it's simply news "gone from the internet" holds no water. News articles from any decade can be found digitised all the time. An April fools jokes tend to be stand out things that news channels have to tell media about afterwards so people don't keep being fooled
Indeed, the timestamped news broadcast should be archived somewhere as well. May be difficult to find viewable copies though.
It's simply a matter of narrowing down relevant possible air dates, and checking the timestamped time for that story.
About that news clip, it's not TOO hard to fake that stuff. Remember the old FHRITP videos that went viral a decade ago?
wtf is fhritp? are people supposed to know what you're talking about?? People can barely spell.
@@helmaschine1885 Literally just type it into the RUclips search bar. Not that hard.
I am totally putting this image of Microsoft Coffee on a mug, so I can have a Microsoft Coffee mug.
You’re a brave man having a Nickelodeon blimp on your desk haha😂😳 good video!
in the 90s i was like 7 and an aunt suddenly stormed the house asking for me, turns out a boy named just like me, same age and city, died on a hunting accident by his brother, named like mine and same age, who also enjoys hunting, the news paper my aunt gave me was lost over the past 20+ years, all the family remembers, but it doesn't exist on the archives nor the internet, lost forever such a tragic and weird incident
The possibility that the story of the Microsoft Coffee prank was, itself, a prank makes me think the theory that Andy Kaufman didn't fake his own death but rather FAKED faking his own death (ie, spent the last few months of his life tricking people into thinking he was faking his death before actually dying).
iirc, there's a forensics toolkit made by microsoft called microsoft cofee... or Microsoft Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor (COFEE)
my theory is that Microsoft themselves are behind this hoax to coverup the forensics app that they don’t want people searching - it makes perfect sense and would explain the high quality of the editing in the video
Do you think they reused the name)
@@thepokeball I think it was intentional and Microsoft is behind this hoax lol
Was waiting for the final twist where you reveal that you made all of it up at the end of the video, but it never happened.
On the subject of missing software, I remember my stepfather renting out an SNES game from Blockbuster that I have not been able to find since. If I had to compare it to anything, it was like... somewhere between _A Link to the Past_ and _Pocky & Rocky._ All I can remember are vague Chinese mythos vibes, a level select screen, and I think one level was a fight on the back of a gigantic green serpentine Dragon.
I have looked high and low, my Stepfather had several friends into gaming so a number of early consoles came through my house, and being about 3-4 years old I don't remember much. I Do remember trying out Cybermorph on Atari Jaguar, and a little of the original Alien Vs Predator long before I knew what a Xenomorph was. That game kept their shilouette in my mind for many years til I saw the actual movie.
There were so many niche, third-party or bootleg games like that at the time. I'm sure it exists but it also sounds near-impossible to find.
If you want to hear about a different kind of “Microsoft Coffee” be sure to check out Dave’s Garage.
i believe that the story could’ve gone missing, easily. lost media is a whole thing. entire shows air and disappear
microsoft java, also known as C# (they are INCREDIBLY similar.)
Microsoft had two other for real Java clones meant to displace it: J++ and J#. J++ was so blatant that Sun Microsistems sued Microsoft over it.
Actually funnier than that. Microsoft was developing initial C# as J# series of extensions to java. But after some time they just couldn't wrangle it anymore so they just dropped java altogether and did the microcode part themselves.
Great video!! This taught me a very important lesson. We can't take it for granted that somebody will document an event just because there's a lot of people in the world. Sometimes zero people will do something because we all assume someone else will.
A lot of things that seem like somebody should be doing them actually have zero people. Popular MMOs have certain places where nobody ever goes to.
This is absolutely a modern hoax and the "VHS tape" gives it away. The constant loss of vertical hold is hiding some of the edits and seams that the creator couldn't. That is _not_ how VHS typically looked and I find it more and more grating that the younger generations actually think that's how things were. The "Analog horror" genre especially is filled with tons of "VHS effect" filters that don't look anything like what real VHS did. You could get that kind of horrible, horrible distortion on a very worn out VCR, but it's not difficult to adjust for that. I've got 30 and 40 year old VHS tapes of family events recorded by my grandparents and a 20 year old VCR and the picture is perfectly fine. No rolling, no "scratchy" lines across the image, no blurring at the top and bottom, no distorted audio. It doesn't look as great on a modern LED screen, though. Just a bit fuzzy, but that's not the fault of the tape or the VCR.
tl;dr: VHS doesn't look like this unless it's played back on an extremely worn out VCR or with a heavily abused tape that has been physically damaged.
So I was curious until I saw the clip from the video, then went to the link and played it. That does not look like VHS playback. I'm 44 so I watched a lot of VHS stuff back in the day (both prerecorded, and tapes we'd reuse maybe dozens of times essentially for DVR-like use, record stuff to tape and watch it later.) I also transferred some ~20 year old tapes that were recorded on camcorder last year. Tapes don't roll like that, I mean when they do the picture is also snowy as hell, you don't get a rolling-but-clear picture then a slight burst of snow.
Also (although this is not definitive), although the WEB was in it's infancy, there was an active Internet going back to the 1980s. Usenet was in very active use back then, and is fully archived. Google group's Usenet search function shows no mentions of Microsoft Coffee either.
Reminds me of the mandela effect.
Microsoft Coffee, you've got some splaining to do.
I still remember how I laughed at the scene when she smiled with her braces on in the movie Moonraker.
it reminds me of the mandela effect in a different way, when fruit of the loom gaslit the whole world into believing there was never a cornucopia
I was just going to comment, this is Mandela effect to the max. Maybe your family hopped timelines, farther than ones usually witnessed in the Mandela Effect which is usually simple spelling differences.
@@realitierney lool
@@realitierney "You've got some splaining to do" is also a mandela effect, but I wasn't part of that.
@@mrJety89 really? One from I Love Lucy????? 😦😵🤯 it’s interesting how some are universal and some are more so much higher, like even 10% population is huge!
ask dave from dave's garage.
Yes, I can vouch that this Microsoft Coffee was real and it did happen. I was an accountant with a small accountancy film (Tate & Oellrich Inc) in Issaquah.
I remember my old keyboard had issues and I visited that egghead store to find a replacement only to see a copy of that Microsoft Coffee. I felt something was really off with the box as the design and colour feels 'off' as if it is printed with a printer... I can't remember exactly as it was so long ago but I did remember the back of the box was full of texts and I remember it is supposed to be a 'programming' software made for Windows 95. It doesn't feel like a real product and since I'm not into programming I just put the item back.
I did, however, remember a bespectacled nerdy guy trying to get a copy of it and was arguing with the cashier insisting he needs it badly. He started throwing tantrum like a child and I just shook my head and left with my purchased keyboard replacement.
And then everyone clapped.
Idk that was kinda beleivable until someone else also tried to purchase it at the same time you were there thats a bit much
Bro i’m so addicted to Nation Squid!!! I NEED MORE VIDEOS
Nationsquid wearing a Green Day shirt gives me an unhealthy amount of serotonin.
I never realised that the programming language Java was named after a type of coffee, nor did I know their logo was a steaming cup of coffee, so I honestly thought for the first part of the video that Microsoft Coffee was going to turn out to be one of those cheap encyclopedia CD-Roms that were everywhere at that time, but just focused entirely on everything there is to know about that specific caffeinated beverage. Either that or a mapping CD-rom (also very common at the time) but entirely revolving around finding the nearest coffee shop wherever you happened to be with your laptop.
It's like the internet never bothers to preserve things unless they can potentially be used to harm someone. (If it can, however, you can bet there will always be a laser-clear trail somewhere.)
Wild to think there was a time when things could reach the news BEFORE the internet.
Love the reference to the Shaggs during your product placement for square space or whatever that was. The Shaggs are awesome
i now own mr squids couch
Can I sniff it?
How dare you switch to Tea. Microsoft coffee got revenge lol
Am I the only one who saw a black sphere moving on the right side of the screen at 05:38????
Terrifying! Flies are so supernatural and scary!
@@helmaschine1885 they are indeed
It's obviously a prank from a different timeline and those pieces of evidence are from that timeline.
Interesting tale. You are a great presenter!
Surely at least one person must have at least a vague memory of this.
I think this could be solved by contacting the news broadcaster. TBH, it seems like it was a prank. Either by the broadcaster themselves, or MS employees who got them to run the story.
That said, if it turns out the news broadcaster was pranked into running the story, that would explain the absence of evidence in web searches. They would have scrubbed it from the web to avoid embarrassment.
W green day fan
Fr, who can hate Green Day
w hawaii part ii/miracle musical fan
W miracle musical fan
W miracle musical fan
The article was posted on April 1st 2021. Nuff said.
He gave Northridge a shout out 😮
I am in the newspaper for some small town college-related thing, which I have a copy of somewhere, and which was republished on that college's website - a website which I later maintained as my first job and absolutely know existed and even probably have a backup of somewhere - but none of this seems to have survived, despite being in 2005-2006. I probably even posted a scan of it to MySpace.
So I would definitely err on the side of "oops we weren't thinking of making durable copies of the news back then"
I have known very noteworthy news items from yesteryear to completely disappear without trace. Surprisingly, it does happen. Without going into too much detail, I remember two events from the late 90's which I just cannot find a single documentation of; one was just the most insanely windy day I've ever known to hit the city I've lived in all my life. By far the strongest storm I've ever witnessed. No record of it. Lists of notable storms and related weather events completely ignore that it ever occurred. And the other thing was a celestial event around 1997 / 98 where, for around a fortnight, you could casually look at the night sky and easily spot at least one shooting star within a few minutes of looking. Again, no trace that this crazy phenomenon ever happened.
Regarding Microsoft Coffee, the weird thing is it seemed really familiar when I started watching this video. I kind of vaguely remembered hearing about it in my early days of getting online, late 00's. The name, the logo, the story of the hoax; all felt like it was something I've heard about before. But now I'm questioning if it isn't simply a clever recent hoax of a hoax which imitated various 90's iconography to create a false memory. It's really interesting.
Man, so interesting video. Keep it up! Greetings from Argentina
2 uploads within a week, nationsquid treatin us good
Actually there is one very plausible explanation that says the video is 100% real, but also why there's no mention of it.
What if they filmed it as a preview for MS executives to review the advertising strategy for this april fools, but then it got cancelled?
It's timestamped. This was recorded over the air.
The live time wouldn't be on an unused preview spot.
@@cooltaylor1015
"It's timestamped."
And you can't do that in photoshop?
Why is the VHS recording of a newscast in the 90's in 16:9 aspect ratio?
its stretched from 4:3
@@leap123_ sure, but i haven't seen a TV yet where it automatically stretches the input to match the TV ratio by default. It has to be selected. So why bother? It's sus.
@@iamaprofessionalMost TVs automatically stretch the composite signal so there’s no black borders
@@iamaprofessional normal behaviour.
@@damian9303 I use VCRs, Laserdisc, and numerous old video game consoles and have for decades and this has never been my experience.
I came to comment on your story about the UFO in the valley in the mid-2000s. I remember that. But what I remember must have happened in either late 2005 or 2006 sometime. I was driving around town with my friend, we were parked somewhere south of Culver City and we both happened to look up to the sky. And we both saw three UFOs flying and hovering in formation. I didn't see what you described, the one UFO close up. These UFOs were about 7000 feet up and just hovering. Sometimes they would move a few hundred feet, sometimes they'd move back. We watched them for about 20 minutes. I don't remember any news story about it, but I wasn't regularly watching the news at that time. I hope this helps you in your quest for truth!
I have 2 thoughts after watching this video.
1. You could have tried harder to solve this riddle by inquiring the tv hosts that supposedly did this story on the news or contacting the tv station where it aired. They might be able to confirm or deny whether this footage is real.
2. People tend to overestimate how much information is stored on the internet. For all the content that is preserved, there is a whole lot more that is lost. Most websites from the early internet years are actually long gone and if it wasnt for the internet archive we would have almost no records of this era. This will happen as well with the web 2.0 era when social media networks are replaced by the next thing. Preservation only happens when people give a shit, and most people dont.
Shaggs reference in the sponsor, never thought I'd see that.
oof! feel bad. can't believe you can't find the UFO.
The only real flaw in this hoax is the news video, we were years away from widescreen broadcast in 1996. Everything on TV was 4:3 in 1996, and there's clearly no stretching of the image so this isn't 4:3 to widescreen upscaling being done here. And the image is quite crisp despite being riddled with tracking lines at opportune times. It is a really well done prank, whoever was behind this put a lot of work into it.
Reminds me of what Simon says on deciding the unknown- the thing about grand conspiracies is that they involve so many people that having no one reveal it is almost impossible
Awesome shirt! My fave band in the world 😁
I swear my brain made you English. Hearing you are from CA was a headspinner 😂😂😂
I’ve always been a little scared how computing from the past can’t really be fully relived years later.
great vid as always!
Oh my, I wish I still worked at Microsoft. There’s a yammer community on Microsoft regarding archivism and that kind of story would definitely be interesting to these folks.
However, many things Microsoft related get lost over time, even at Microsoft. I remember many folks asking for pieces of PR related things or emails and etc there
the glitchiness really calls everything into question