Easy: my mother drilled it into me for years that a prank played after 12 noon on April 1st made you the fool, I've abided by that rule of the game for 35 years, I'm not about to start breaking it now.
I didn't ask. I just explained I was following up on some footage of a news report by them that I suspected might be computer generated, and I wanted to verify the legitimacy of the video and event.
Well, you can't believe them even if it's not. People tend to remember things that never happened.
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.
I wasn't teasing, I actually called them. I was curious if it was a deepfake ML video so I wanted to find out. I got passed around quite a bit till I spoke with a guy in news room archives who had been there "a long time and would know", that's why I specifically got passed to him I believe.
> People tend to remember things that never happened.
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.
It ought to be possible to find another clip of the same anchors in the 90s, which would settle the issue. I spent a few minutes on Youtube and found a lot of KOMO news clips from 1995 but none with those anchors. I still think it's authentic because it would be so hard to fake. If anyone really cared they could probably get someone at the TV station, which still exists (https://komonews.com/), to confirm that the clip is real.
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.
Lifelong Seattle resident here. Yea, that's Keith Eldridge and everything there looks perfectly accurate to 1996 KOMO. Here's a 5yr old video of Keith for age comparison.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXIc5SQxG3o
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's index isn't as vast as they claim. Their "About 5,780,000,000 results" is a gross exaggeration. You can't actually view all those results even if you tried.
Most engines are also very aggressive at de-prioritizing abandoned sites, so most of the content from 90s essentially gone dark - it's indexed but cannot be found unless you know exactly what to look for.
Oh, I didn't mean you get 11 pages for every single query. I do know about the omitted results (but thanks for pointing it out, as its not obvious to many!), I used 11 as a placeholder since the final page # varies by query. Like, I get ~50 pages for 'icecream' out of the supposed 8 million or so. Crazy!
AFAIK there is no way to view all of those millions of results that they claim to have.
Egghead Software, which I visited a lot at the time because my parents' office was right around the corner, was at I think 4th and University, or somewhere around there. KOMO and the other stations are adjacent to downtown so it would be easy for them to come snag the box before MS PR descended.
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.
To get trademark protection in a particular class (e.g. candy belongs to class 30, "staple foods"), you have to demonstrate you are using the trademark in commerce.
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.
Remember that the prank preceded the mainstream web, and MS PR clearly went to great lengths to cover it up. I don't think the internet was "remembering everything" yet at that point
Google's public index is just the short head, maybe even less than 5% of the internet by pages. Old stuff is more or less all pushed out unless its popular.
you don't do google justice. They are fully capable of displaying very outdated information. As an example, i recently wanted to look up election results from a certain country, a day after. Google decided to show me some tired, old news snippets from elections in 2015.
> I'm assuming Seattlites would be able to confirm.
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.
I still remember the prank from the late 1980s when KING ran a story that the Space Needle fell over.
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.
Since about 10 years ago, Seattle started taking itself too seriously. It desperately needs a local humor show to add some balance, and what goes on is ripe for parody.
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.)
I can't find anything to confirm the actual release advertisement of Turbo Pascal, either. There were later articles and those about later versions, but I guess Turbo Pascal never had a release advertisement. It's not indexed by Google.
The VHS tracking is what makes me suspicious (and of course the date, the lack of any mention of it at all)
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.
Former Seattleite... those are (were?) legit KOMO news anchors. I believe the person on the left's name is Keith Eldridge. I don't remember the name of the person on the right, but I do recognize them.
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.
> If you've waited for 25 years to announce something, you're going to get video captured correctly.
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.
I dunno, I don't think I would care about getting a perfect capture of a VHS tape from a silly project 25 years ago. The VHS artifacts add character to the memory.
Yeah - I feel as if the task of building a fake news desk, hiring two (very convincing) actors to pose as anchors, filming it, and chopping it up in Premiere to give it the VHS look is way more effort than someone would put into a prank like this.
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
I note that the thing "period" movies usually get wrong is the hairstyle, as the actors are reluctant to adopt the historical hairstyles. Even Star Trek TOS is plagued by 1960s hairstyles.
I don't know... The footage for some reason is in the form of a mobile phone recording of the playback of the actual footage. Now you could say that the creator of the page didn't have the original video just found it on youtube, but it's not the case. They were the one to upload it. (And now I see that they also have a photo of the VHS cassette on the site.)
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.
I'm open to accepting it as authentic, even with those reasons. VHS to Digital Converters are some a common household item, and when I bought one for old family videos, they still can act up. The distortion can come from age and improper storage, not just overuse. Secondly, some of our old family photos from before digital cameras were made digital simply through scanning 4 of them together.
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.
Presumably it was the tape that degraded over the decades (perhaps stuffed in a box, moved from house to house, thought of as junk until they had the idea to post it on the internet)
I said this upstream, but I have clear memories of borrowing tapes of stuff people had recorded off their tv in the 90s and having exactly these kinds of glitches. I think we're seeing the difference between a professionally recorded vhs and a home system that someone just learned how to use.
Analog didn't have an "XxY" resolution. VHS was about 3MHz of luma resolution and 400Khz of chroma, which was 240 lines - but that was interlaced, so your actual vertical resolution was 480 lines per interlaced frame (30 per second at US rates) -- but your Y (luma) signal would change far more often than your Pb and Pr signals (which gave the color by recording how far off the Y signal Blue and Red were)
NTSC has a nominal resolution of 720x480i (240 lines per field, 60 fields per second). VHS on its best days could get about half the horizontal resolution for luma, and even less for color, but often ended up a bit worse, so 320x480i is probably a good approximation for the resolution (ignoring the fact that color is even lower resolution).
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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.
Maybe, but as I remember it, VHS looked much better than analog TV from the same time. I remember being marveled by how clear it looked in comparison (mostly because it did not have as much noise as analog TV did even with a good antenna).
My family didn't really mess with VHS recording growing up, but I do remember getting shitty tapes from friends' families who had recorded stuff off tv and seeing glitches like this. Could just be the vhs player/recorders didn't work as well as professional ones?