Is there any reason to believe that this actually happened? Conveniently, it was published on April 1st. The story itself would be a great April Fools' prank. :)
However as much discussion we've had about the internet remembering everything, I can't find anything in Google to confirm "Microsoft Coffee" except for this site, discussion of it on Reddit 13 hours ago.
Google has lost a lot of old posts from those days, but I'd be surprised if it would have lost all of them.
Internet Explorer only launched in 1995, and the anti-Linux Halloween Documents were 1998.
Perhaps, however remember the Mandela Effect. I'd expect ong time KOMO viewers and staff to recognise the presenters, and I'm sure they were the right ones. I wouldn't trust their recollection of this story though, especially once they had seen the video - after all the camera never lies.
Remember news anchors read dozens of these stories a day, to recall one specific prank 25 years later isn't likely. Unlikely KOMO still have recordings of their output from back then.
KING ran retractions for days, and did their best to bury the footage.
I saw it when KING ran it, and had a good laugh. It was an obvious prank (the video looked like a bad cut & paste job, and the reporters were local comedians from "Almost Live"), but too bad a handful of humorless people ruined it.
I ran into Bill Nye some years later and asked him about it, and he replied they got into a lot of trouble for it.
Almost Live was always making fun of Boeing, Microsoft, cops, local sports fans, anyone who lived in Kent, gangs, local hair metal bands, etc. All in good fun.
(They even got the hair metal band members to come on the show and parody themselves.)
Its choice not to display any information older than the attention span of a cracked out chipmunk is one of the main reasons I stopped using Google.
"stale as buns" is my phrase of choice.
(even i'm cringing at the metaphor, but if you think about it, it sums up what i'm trying to say. Pretty well)
I hope that if you're being serious about 11 being the max, that it was a deliberate reference.
AFAIK there is no way to view all of those millions of results that they claim to have.
Honestly this prank makes more sense to me as a forgotten thing than as a modern meta-prank. I would not be surprised if Bill or some other prime mover from that era hears about it and confirms at some point.
In the 1990s they released "drag 'n' drops" - a gummy candy in the shape of dragons. I can't find any mention of them.
Stuff like this seems whimsical, but it serves the very serious purpose of allowing Microsoft to claim exclusive use of their name in that class.
the rolling part of the tape is a little too much imo and a lot of programs have filters that add the grainy nature so it's not impossible. that and seeing as you can hire random celebs for 100 bucks nowadays to shout out at your friend it's not unimaginable that they faked this. it's probably true but also... who knows
If you've waited for 25 years to announce something, you're going to get video captured correctly.
> There’s the KOMO News footage, which some of us still have on a dusty VHS tape
Does anyone from Seatle recognise the two KOMO reporters?
If the footage is a deep fake over real footage from that time, I'm very very impressed. I suspect that the audio is fake, sort of matches up with the real recording, and the box is digitally replaced.
maybe the tape degraded?
Probably Kathi Goertzen?
From here, I looked up pictures of anchors who worked in that time period, and I see Eric Slocum (now deceased) and Margo Myers who did evening news together in that time frame, and look quite similar to the people in the video.
EDIT: someone else identified Keith Eldridge, who definitely looks like a match for the video.
The video maight have been digitized years ago not yesterday.
I think a really good prank using deep fake tech.
I mean this assumes said perfect video exists. I don't think most people would go to extreme lengths to preserve a video tape of a prank they performed 25 years ago.
[edit]
On a slightly different note, the HiFi audio track (supported for playback by pretty much all VCRs by the late 80s; not sure if/when HiFi recording became normal) of VHS was undoubtably the highest quality consumer analog audio product to get wide usage, with an SNR and dynamic range slightly better than the very best cassette decks.
The vertical hold going as in the featured article was more of a 60s/70s thing in my memory.
It's unlikely that 'someone at the station' could confirm that clip was real, getting archive footage from that time would be difficult. I worked on various shows in the 00s, there's no way I'd remember any packages we broadcast, and there's no easy access to archives before 2008. We've been digitising decades of cut news packages in foreign bureaus for years, but I don't believe actual as-broadcast stuff on tape has been systematically kept, and we didn't have it digitised - at least long term - until about 10 years later.
Other than that, GP may have just been teasing. I mean what's the probability that you call them and they still have the same people there after 25 years? You call them and one of those rare guys (who's still there after 25 years) answers the phone. Or whoever answers the phone is willing to take the time to find someone who has been there since then. Seems unlikely.
While I don't intend/want to derail the focus here, this happens to make for an excellent coincidental articulation of one of the key things conspiracy theorists seem to not be able to comprehend in their mental models of the world.
Also, the recording itself is in a pretty bad shape, trying to sell you that it's a very old VHS tape that has been played a huge number of times.
My point being, this could be one of those instances where a prank happened before April Fools became a corporate marketing tool. It wasn't hidden away out of fear, but just sort of "because" that was how the internet worked back then. Not everything was digitized and made available for eternity then.
The full link in the screenshot is this and it still works! http://www.pcweek.com/spencer/spencer.html
update: adding wayback link: https://web.archive.org/web/19960512211429/http://www.pcweek...
update 2: From the main link: "There are a handful of print articles from tech magazines at the time"
Turns out that the Internet Archive has a ton of computer magazines scanned in and there's a lot from 1996 so now I'm going down a rabbit hole both searching for any mention of this and also nostalgia: https://archive.org/details/computermagazines?sort=-date&and...
The fact I've spent some time actually looking this up though makes this the best prank of the last few years. The video especially is a masterpiece of fakery.
Like, maybe this inspired the prank somehow?
I would go with a fun joke.
host `dig www.microsoftcoffee.org +short | tail -1`
51.165.217.172.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer pnatla-aa-in-f19.1e100.net.Doesn't seem like it
There's nothing suspicious about that CA. If you do a search[1] you can see plenty certificates issued for benign sites. My guess is that's the CA for google related products? eg. GCP, app engine, or google site builder.
Youtube, SSL, domain, everything. April first. Also, humorously hosted on google.
But are we sure this is just some lame webpage? If the prank is to gaslight the internet into believing the Microsoft Coffee prank took place wouldn't the news segment covering the prank also be fake? I have no idea if that was the anchor for that TV station in the 90s. That would be way more entertaining to me than some press release or fake product page.
I'm leaning more to "this is real", but it's astounding there's no reference to it before yesterday.
Thanks, fixed.
Why? It wasn't nationwide, it was local. They said a few hundred boxes on shelves for less than 24hrs.
The only people to know would be people seeing two 60 sec local news clips. Info didn't spread the same back then as it does now.
Again, not proof that it happened, but also not a shock that if it happened there aren't records of it.
To the original question, the alleged original prank still outweighs any contemporary green screen antics: producing multiple physical fake boxes, distributing them across town in multiple stores, and getting local news to pick up on it. That's a lot of work.
The hypothetical 2021 prank? Why Microsoft? Why Java? Why the completely forgotten medium of cardboard boxes?
Simulacrum, simulacra, ...
There were articles recounting April fools day pranks, but none mention Microsoft Coffee which is weird to me considering that it was covered on a local station.
As they explain, if you have evidence of abuse on HN, you should be emailing hn@ycombinator.com so we can investigate. But other commenters having different $BigCo tastes from you doesn't count as evidence.