[jasoneckert]

I remember using this key to install hundreds (possibly thousands?) of school PCs back in the 1990s since I couldn't remember our volume license key. And Microsoft's terms explicitly stated the key we used didn't matter as long as an audit revealed that the number of installed systems matched the number of purchased licenses.

Similarly, 111-1111112 was a valid key for Office.

[DaiPlusPlus]

That practice never stopped: even today, the current version of Visual Studio 2022 Enterprise available for download from MSDN (well, "Visual Studio Subscription") has an option to use a static product-key (which I believe is the same for everyone, considering the search-results I get for the first 5 digits...) - but for some reason the lower SKUs (Community, Standard (rip), and Professional) switched to _only_ supporting MSA-based online activation, so if you have an air-gapped or disconnected dev situation you have to shell-out for the full-fat edition - but at least you get to use it indefinitely.

...which is always really important considering the 20-30+ year lifecycle of actual software - whereas Adobe and their Creative Cloud service is copying Apple's strategy of pretending all their software older than 5-6 years simply never existed in the first place. "Adobe Flash/Fireworks/FreeHand? Never heard of it." - which is a huge PITA for people who might have old source files in those lovely propreitary binary file-formats that can't be opened in newer versions of Adobe software - so what on earth does Adobe expect them to do? This is insane...