Buying an entire Egghead Software store (2005) | Hacker News Reader

Buying an entire Egghead Software store (2005)

devblogs.microsoft.com

Yes, did that a few times as well: not for an OS (but an antivirus product, so close-ish...) and not with Egghead but mostly with CompUSA and Fry's (both now also long gone, I think?). This was at a time when it was theoretically already possible to try/buy software over the Internet, but the resulting clogging of our connection lead to too many complaints, so a road trip it was!

Other than the bugs/extreme performance regressions they turned up in our product, the most interesting takeaways from these exercises were that: 1. most consumer software is really, really bad; 2. good package design is really, really hard.

It may be hard to imagine now, but unboxing software used to be quite exciting. How many manuals? How good? Early software releases had pretty good documentation: I still fondly remember the first editions of Microsoft's developer tools as well as their Office suite, which came with a full set of printed decent-quality manuals. That practice went out of the window for good shortly after, though, and online documentation has IMHO never reached the same quality. But that may just be the nostalgia speaking...

There was a sweet time from the early 80s to just before Internet distribution of programs took off where you could "gauge" the quality and value of a software package by lifting the box.

If it was heavy, you knew there was an impressive manual inside, and if they took the time to make and print a manual, they probably took the time to develop the software well.

Here's Lotus 1-2-3: https://www.ebay.com/itm/283699892988

SimCity 3000 was perhaps the last game with a big printed manual: https://www.ebay.com/itm/354226256399

There were exceptions in both directions of course (for example, shareware-distributed Doom; random clip-art compilations with a crappy "editor" that came with a printed book showing each one), but if you were browsing a shelf it wasn't a bad rule of thumb.

Shortly after that everything went to small box with a CD/DVD in it (and a manual in PDF form, if any) and then even those mostly disappeared and now everything is online help.

It spawned the whole Missing Manual series, and there's something lost that interactive help can never replace - the manuals had a journey and a theme and you'd often find things you never even knew you wanted by reading them.

I still sometimes pick up old manuals at thrift stores just to read.

I tend to ignore manuals, but two exceptions stand out to me. The Civilization series always continued making decent in-game manuals, or maybe 'wikis' is the more appropriate term. And while I would say that the manual for bash and python are decent, if inconsistent --- I wish bash manuals would prioritize frequently used arguments or flags --- R has really taken things to another level. R is probably the only software where my first instinct is not to google it, but to actually look at the documentation, because it is integrated so seamlessly, and because it is well organized: parameters at the top, examples at the bottom. And R's cheat sheets are also something else: https://posit.co/resources/cheatsheets/ . I had some of those laminated, because they are just such a joy to look at and browse.

Working at Egghead was great. Commission was basically based on the size of the box. Miss you PageMaker.

I worked at Egghead when Windows 3.1 was released. We pushed that hard because the spiff for it was $25, iirc. My sales bonus that month was something like $2,000. (And Egghead was how I met the people that got me into software dev at Interplay when Egghead changed owners and went downhill.)

I have a small pile of old manuals like Windows OS manuals, Corel, some MS Office manuals, a three volume IBM set (I think for 5150?); Disk Operating System, Operations, BASIC. I hate to throw them out.

Some of them go for relatively decent prices on eBay.

I remember Baldur's Gate 1 manual having near enough info to play D&D session

One of my favourite Unix manuals: https://www.autometer.de/unix4fun/coherent/ftp/manuals/COHER... (Coherent died in the mid-90s but it had a really good manual).

Fry's is gone. We had a really nice one near where I live and my son and I spent some quality bonding time in it. Was very sad to see it die, as it went slowly, aisle by aisle being decimated, ever decreasing employee quantity and quality with the electronics area (eg: what you used to buy at Radio Shack; diodes, LEDs, breadboard, resisters and the like) the last vestige of people who knew much of anything about what they were selling.

I remember that Word 4.0 (for DOS) came with at least four thick binders of manuals, similar to the WordPerfect manual here (but even thicker IIRC): https://www.ebay.com/itm/324124151292. It was fun and convenient to browse through them.

Ah, manuals.

Lately I have been learning Moho, an animation program that's been around since 1999. It's got two PDF manuals - one that's specifically ~300p of tutorials, one that's ~600p of reference - and they are both fabulous. Gorgeously laid out, lucidly written. I'm in heaven. Fuck context-sensitive help, fuck video tutorials, here's everything I need to know to get started with this power tool. From the rawest beginner concepts to "here is how a .moho file is structured in case you need to read/write one as part of some convoluted multi-app workflow".

Sadly if you buy a physical copy you just get a DVD. I think I need to take these two PDFs down to Office Depot and get them printed out, sharing the computer screen with the program or putting it on a tablet just isn't cutting it.

> unboxing software used to be quite exciting

In addition to the manuals, I remember Ultima also came with a map and a shiny coin. It was worth buy some games back then just for the physical toys.

https://web.archive.org/web/20060212093806/http://blogs.msdn...

It's unfortunate that the MSDN blog shufflings over the years resulted in losing all the comments on the original post...

They told the employees that if they got the programs to work with Windows, they could keep them.

Of course, that makes them income, so the employees would have to pay income tax on them. I wonder how many of the employees scrambling to get programs that they didn't already think were worth buying on their own, figured this out?

Also, the employees got to keep the programs after Windows shipped. Which meant that they were probably reported for income tax purposes at their full price (because Microsoft bought them at full price), but by the time the employees got to keep them, the programs were probably discounted in actual stores.

I was going to suggest that the benefits would be _de minimis_ and thus nonreportable, but having read through some of the IRS guidance, I no longer think that's the case, as the ability to keep was conditional on the employees testing it. If it was instead "please take up to two programs home, and we'd appreciate any bug reports if you use them", I think that would qualify as de minimis through.

In practice, I doubt the IRS would care even if they knw about it, and I suspect Microsoft's Finance/Compliance teams didn't even know about this as it seems like an Engineering Manager's own initiative.

(There may of course be a different exclusion that applies -- I'm not going to read through the Internal Revenue Code to check...)

In the "Decompiling Lego Island" video [1], the author mentions there was a fix specific for this game in Windows 2000 leaked source code. It probably came from compatibility testing initiatives like one in the article.

[1] https://youtu.be/MToTEqoVv3I

Yes, the good-old-days :)

I really miss those days, personal systems were much easier to maintain and hack. With that said, at this point I had been using Coherent for at least 5 years.

And now in Microsoft the designers and porject managers brag that they dont even use Windows at all.

If they had a real CEO it would be a good cause for instant termination.

If Microsoft only hired people who prefer using windows, they would struggle to hire anyone at all. Windows is a clown car. Anyone who works on it can only slap on more clown features to appease their managers.

funny how we still have people even on hn dissing Windows. How old are you?

No srsly how old are you?

My arch linux works great, just takes a little bit more fines than Windows. My Windows runs very well for the last 6 years and happily entertains me with tons of games, chrome and lightroom. The MacOS i'm using at work though, also works totally fine.

You trigger people on purpose right?

Sounds like software piracy if they were sharing copies.

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