Makes you wonder how some innocent messages written years ago now feel unnerving when thinking about the cyberpunk megacorps world we are heading into….

Who comes up with this stuff ?
“Most of your files are still there.”
Probably.
Perfect message for when Bitlocker locks you out.
I wasn’t worried about my files until I saw this message.
Imagine if you came home and your dad was like “Hey how was your day? All your things are exactly where you left them.”
My grandfather managed to install win 11 without meaning to, and the result was kinda “all your things are exactly where you left them, except we just remodeled the entire house, changed all the appliances, removed half the doors, replaced some with windows, and installed an unusable pool in the bathroom. Oh and the fridge is in the bedroom behind the living room couch.”
Trying to explain why everything is different over the phone was real fun.
I never in my life was sure that they had changed something.
Was like seeing the second cat in the matrix.
I miss when it used to be run by computer geeks who just wanted to do cool stuff.
So Windows Xp and earlier?
Yes, XP or maybe a couple years earlier was about when the dominant theme switched from innovation to version churn, getting customers to keep re-buying the same things over and over whether they needed updating or not.
I remember in '99 there was an ActiveX object called XmlHttpRequest, that made what we called “back channel requests” - it made a call to an url and handed the results to script in the page, which could do whatever we wanted with it - populate fields, make things appear or disappear, etc. At that time this only worked in IE. It genuinely turned web pages into apps - very exciting! I randomly had a conversation with the IE dev manager and asked him if this feature would be native in the next version of IE instead of having to use an ActiveX object. Surprisingly he wasn’t even familiar with the whole concept, and said, almost verbatim: “Now that Netscape is basically dead, there’s really no motivation for us to innovate in the browser space.” A couple years later somebody wrote an article calling the whole process “AJAX” and explained clearly how to do it, and suddenly it was the new web dev hotness. Firefox added native support for it, and MS (as usual) was playing catch-up.
Microsoft is very kind to let the user log in to their operating system and look around and feel at home. It’s like being in a computer hotel and you have a room as long as you keep paying, but you are a guest in your computer.
Microsoft: we’ll put your personal devices in a fucking HOA!
Apple: same, but we’ll mow the fucking grass.
Linux: fuck off. You are all ghetto trash. Here are the tools to address your problems. Use them or don’t. I don’t care.
Google: ….people still like chrome and YouTube right?
Netflix: piracy is for nerds! We will curate our library so you always have to find something else to watch, since what you paid for isn’t going to be there tomorrow.
Apple: we have TV shows too and they don’t disappear!
Amazon: but nobody watches you. With us, we have free shipping and hazbin hotel. We are basically glitch!
Glitch: the fuck you are. Watch knights of Guinevere to see what everyone actually thinks of all of you.
Me: …did I accidentally quadruple dose my adderall today?

From …from us.
They ain’t buying, they’re selling.
You forgot to change it to “Don’t turn off our PC”
Hah, nice FTFY
When was Microsoft honest?


This is from almost 30 years back here in Belgium

This in and off itself is ironic
The image says “It is now safe to turn off your computer”
The font and color match the shutdown screen from release versions of MS Windows 95, as far as I can tell / if I recall correctly.
(Also IIRC, ACPI was new enough that MS Windows 95 [or any software] couldn’t actually turn off most of the machines it was installed on, which is why the screen exists at all.)
Thanks for the added details!
in this ss of a win10 install. they’re giving you a heads up on what to expect. how awfully nice of them to not bury it in a 200 page TOS.
deleted by creator
I think the thing that irks me more than anything else about Windows is that it always refers to itself as “us”. I hate it.
Some people must enjoy the idea that there’s a whole flock of people lurking in their PC, but it ain’t me.
Barely related tangent, but maybe kinda related:
The Seattle Light Rail.
The train cars have computerized voice speakers for announcing stops and such.
When you get to a stop, they say ‘Please use the exit doors on my left/right’, depending on which station, where the platform is, etc.
But it’s her left. Not the left.
… The train owns its own body and is apparently alive.
Subtly reminding you that you don’t really own your PC.
It’s the royal “we”
All your base are belong to us.
Base.
Base.
Base base base bAss bAsS BASS BASS…
(and something like that is how dubstep was born, lol)
What you say !!
You have no way to survive make your time.
I always just thought those messages were written as a group, like a Christmas card.
Worked for the Borg…
microshaft used to be honest?
Maybe at some point in the far past, certainly before Linus started Linux, if ever.
The Halloween Documents tell us it wasn’t this century.
No, they were dishonest even when Bill Gates was first negotiating with IBM to develop PC-DOS for the IBM PC. They made a deal and then turned around and bought 86-DOD/QDOS from Seattle Computer Products for $50,000.
SCP later successfully sued Microsoft for concealing their relationship with IBM which allowed them to buy QDOS far more cheaply than otherwise.
When did that happen?
If “everything” means your personal information and data, sure.
Its even more literal than that.
Write them into your will.
Leave everything to them.
they’re talking about inheritance as a suggested new way to pay for your copilot subscription
when?
Who, the borg?
“We are now rolling back the update we already spent 40 minutes installing. Resistance is futile.”
And we’re going to try re-isntalling it first thing when you finally get back into our computer.
No thanks















