The sticker part makes sense, but why did it say "now," which usually would imply it once didn't include Tetris? I guess "includes Tetris!" just sounded awkward on its own?
Or maybe they made stickers for the contingency where they would ship some without Tetris, get the license, and ship some more with?
Given the context and your reference to Quake, I assume by "the older days" you mean the 90s, and specifically PCs and early Windows?
If you weren't previously aware of "The Old New Thing" blog, Raymond Chen has been sharing stories about Windows 95 development for decades at this point. So many in fact, he published a book under the same name (the book is essentially a best-of collection from the blog in paper form).
The os2museum[1] blog is also a gold mine. Tim Paterson at one point tried to start blogging, sharing a few anecdotes about the early days of DOS[2]
Speaking of books, you might enjoy "Showstopper!" about the development of NT, even tough it is a bit shallow on the technical side. For the technical aspects, you might want to get it together with "Inside Windows NT" (first edition) by Helen Custer.
You might also enjoy: "Another Boring Topic" [3] YouTube channel, covering (among other things) early Windows development in excruciating detail and "Old Computers Sucked" [4], actually trying to run the software on era appropriate hardware. "Cathode Ray Dude" is all over the place but often also covers hardware and software of roughly that era[5].
A sibling comment already mentioned JWZs blog, if you have fond memories about Netscape, you might enjoy "Project Code Rush" [6].
How much faster are manufacturing timelines now compared to back then? How long was a lead time for such printing job back then compared to now? Has it gotten easier or not? Seems like there is real question here how long it will take to print batch before manufacturing.
What happened to the headline? The post is headlined "Why did the Microsoft Entertainment Pack for Windows have a special sticker announcing that it also had Tetris?", which is a correctly formed English sentence.
The HN headline currently says "Why Microsoft Entertainment Pack had a sticker announcing that it had Tetris?", which... isn't.
Hacker News has an 80 character limit for titles. The full title is 111 characters, so the submitter editorialised it to cut down the length to 77 characters.
The sticker part makes sense, but why did it say "now," which usually would imply it once didn't include Tetris? I guess "includes Tetris!" just sounded awkward on its own?
Or maybe they made stickers for the contingency where they would ship some without Tetris, get the license, and ship some more with?
Could be a psychological trick to make consumers think that they're buying an "improved" version.
The latter sounds very plausible, it covers all bases.
Anyone have a larger collection of stories/anecdotes from the older days of computing?
Stories like this, and the Quake cd posted recently, are hugely interesting to me.
Given the context and your reference to Quake, I assume by "the older days" you mean the 90s, and specifically PCs and early Windows?
If you weren't previously aware of "The Old New Thing" blog, Raymond Chen has been sharing stories about Windows 95 development for decades at this point. So many in fact, he published a book under the same name (the book is essentially a best-of collection from the blog in paper form).
The os2museum[1] blog is also a gold mine. Tim Paterson at one point tried to start blogging, sharing a few anecdotes about the early days of DOS[2]
Speaking of books, you might enjoy "Showstopper!" about the development of NT, even tough it is a bit shallow on the technical side. For the technical aspects, you might want to get it together with "Inside Windows NT" (first edition) by Helen Custer.
You might also enjoy: "Another Boring Topic" [3] YouTube channel, covering (among other things) early Windows development in excruciating detail and "Old Computers Sucked" [4], actually trying to run the software on era appropriate hardware. "Cathode Ray Dude" is all over the place but often also covers hardware and software of roughly that era[5].
A sibling comment already mentioned JWZs blog, if you have fond memories about Netscape, you might enjoy "Project Code Rush" [6].
Btw. Netscape Navigator 3.0 has just turned 30.
[1] https://www.os2museum.com/wp/
[2] https://dosmandrivel.blogspot.com/
[3] https://www.youtube.com/@AnotherBoringTopic/videos
[4] https://www.youtube.com/@old-computers-sucked/videos
[5] https://www.youtube.com/@CathodeRayDude/videos
[6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Q7FTjhvZ7Y
In addition to the blog where this post is taken from https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/, you could check https://folklore.org/ for early Apple anecdotes. And also https://www.jwz.org/blog/ for early Netscape/Mozilla stories
Raymond Chen certainly publishes such tidbits on his Microsoft blog
How much faster are manufacturing timelines now compared to back then? How long was a lead time for such printing job back then compared to now? Has it gotten easier or not? Seems like there is real question here how long it will take to print batch before manufacturing.
In a way, this is a real-world example of the Strategy Pattern: keep the stable structure fixed, while making the uncertain part replaceable later.
What happened to the headline? The post is headlined "Why did the Microsoft Entertainment Pack for Windows have a special sticker announcing that it also had Tetris?", which is a correctly formed English sentence.
The HN headline currently says "Why Microsoft Entertainment Pack had a sticker announcing that it had Tetris?", which... isn't.
Hacker News has an 80 character limit for titles. The full title is 111 characters, so the submitter editorialised it to cut down the length to 77 characters.