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A comment on Almost 37 years after its launch, someone found an Easter egg in Windows 1.0. Parent comment

Re:Almost 37 years after its launch, someone found an Easter... by AdmiralAsshat on Thursday March 24, 2022 @10:51AM (#30790687)
Yeah, I'm curious how exactly this data got back to Microsoft. We had a family computer back in the day that definitely ran DOS / Windows 3.1 / Doom, so we in theory would have been one of those data points. But with no internet for another 5-8 years or so, I can say pretty confidently that the number of floppies I sent to Microsoft with data from my computer was a big fat zero.

So how would they have retrieved this data?

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Re:Almost 37 years after its launch, someone found an Easter... by pavlov on Thursday March 24, 2022 @11:01AM (#30790847)
I've been reading Steven Sinofsky's extremely detailed blog about those days (it's at https://hardcoresoftware.learningbyshipping.com). He was in charge of Office in the late '90s.

He mentions that Microsoft had a program where they partnered with large enterprises to collect usage data from corporate desktops. But those computers were on a network even if though often not on the Internet yet.

Stats that would show Doom towering over Windows 3.1 must have been collected manually, maybe by sending people a floppy that contained a program to collect the data, and asking them to mail it back in. "Insert floppy, then type A:\SPY.EXE in your DOS prompt" ...

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Re:Almost 37 years after its launch, someone found an Easter... by dTal on Thursday March 24, 2022 @07:53PM (#30797073)
The sounds like a hilarious parody of modern telemetry. But then, the fact the Netflix used to work by mailing you DVDs also sounds silly to modern ears. I don't entirely trust my intuition on what the 90s were capable of.
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Re:Almost 37 years after its launch, someone found an Easter... by kalleboo on Thursday March 24, 2022 @11:23PM (#30798308)
In the 50's, TV ratings were automatically collected on a 16mm film camera attached to your TV and mailed weekly back to HQ, in exchange for free TV repair https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nielsen_ratings#Measuring_rati...
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Re:Almost 37 years after its launch, someone found an Easter... by Melatonic on Thursday March 24, 2022 @01:32PM (#30792963)
I am guessing a floppy mailed back and forth
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