If you're German-speaking: "Klopilot" and "Vibrierkot" are some modern day personal favorites.

On a similar, nostalgic note, I recall boot screens for "Sinnlos 98" floating around, back when modifying the bootup logo was a thing.

There are regions in Germany (Hessen) where "Azure" is pronounced the exact same way as "Ärger" (trouble). Makes you think...

Wow, that's incredible. Even though I'm from Hessen, I never thought of making that connection!

For Latvians Windows Vista was pretty funny cluck cluck.

"Der Ätsch-Browser".

Relevant cultural context from Germany:

In Germany, there exists a popular children's game named "Das verrückte Labyrinth" (in English it's simply named "Labyrinth": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labyrinth_(board_game) ).

When you get a corner-shaped card (in German: "Eckkarte")

> https://boardgamegeek.com/image/155268/labyrinth

from the turn of the previous player, your intended move will typically be more complicated to visualize (at least for children) - this is what this game is about - so children tended to name a "Eckkarte" an "Ätschkarte".

Maybe that game exists, but it's an old word and you can find references for it that are hundreds of years old. Its meaning fits to the browser. Your statement that it's just some kind of reference to some special game is not correct.

Don’t forget Kleinweich

I thought we preferred the alliteration "Winzigweich".

Ok, Vibrierkot is something for the German shitpost communities with all my Zuhausis im Zwischennetz.

You made me laugh, thanks.

As a Polish man I love Klopilot <3

Maybe you can explain it for we non German speakers.

Klopilot: Klo ~ Toilet Vibrierkot: Kot ~ Faeces

What is "Vibrierkot" supposed to sound like?

Probably 'vibe code'?

Now I see it... Needed morning coffee to kick in

> Klopilot

funnily enough works just fine in Polish

Nothing beats małomiękki

Winamp, by Nullsoft.

> Klopilot

I like "Copy-lot".

Last week on a comedy show (the daily show) they made a joke about bill gates "micro and soft" which was old in the 90s already, so I can confirm this is the case.

I think this was 100% justifiable use. If the founder of the company is going to be hanging out with pedophiles and sex traffickers, then micro and soft jokes are open season. All of his philanthropic adventures will never wipe his stain clean.

I've always said it was in bad taste for Bill Gates to name the company after his johnson.

So... Just how old is that joke?

https://youtu.be/njos57IJf-0

  I've gotta bring up
  some BASIC shit
  Why'd you name your company
  after your dick?

I used to have a M$ email signature 30 years ago, and pay, nowaydays I mostly use Windows on my laptop, because I am not willing to pay Apple prices even though I can afford them, and even last year I was dealing with GNU/Linux installation issues on a Gigabyte BRIX.

Don't forget Windoze.

Don't forget Winblows

Another oldie

"If you play the Win98 CD backwards, it summons Satan. It's worse when you play it forwards - it installs Windows"

Ah, good times... :-)

I had to reinstall win98 so many times I still remember the pirate key k4hvdq9tj96crx9c9g68rq2d3 by heart

good times :)

I guess I was more of the FCKGW generation. :)

IIRC with Windows 98 you could just use any product key you had on as many machines as you wanted since there was no activation or real phoning home capabilities. So most likely your whole friend group would be using the same serial that was copied off your uncle's old gateway.

Ah, FuCK Gates, William.

I think there were at least three other commonly used codes, but this one was by far the most popular.

I'm pretty sure 000-0000000 worked (at least on windows 95)

FuCKinG Windows

Sounds like hard work. Didn't 11111-1111111 work?

I have a "quotes.txt" from slashdot days with some MS jabs in it:

> Last week, I left my 2 XP CDs on my dashboard in plain view. Someone broke into my car and left 2 more.

> The day Microsoft makes a product that doesn't suck is the day they make a vacuum cleaner.

> A Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer is to computing what a McDonalds Certified Food Specialist is to fine cuisine

Juvenile some might say, but they still makes me giggle.

Greetings fellow old person. You totally took me back to 2000. And here’s me thinking I was the only one harvesting pithy quotes from /.

I always loved the “doesn’t suck vacuum”, but amazingly never came across the Win98 CD line. Love it.

> > The day Microsoft makes a product that doesn't suck is the day they make a vacuum cleaner.

"The only Microsoft product that doesn't suck is the Microsoft vacuum cleaner."

That's what I remember. And true to this day.

Thanks for making me feel old. I remember reading slashdot a lot and also freshmeat.net to find new interesting software. I don't think I like the modern software experience, by comparison. It's all shoddy rehashing of the client/server model, where the client is crap and slow, and so is the server.

Outbreak Express!

It was "Outhouse Express" and "GruntPage" for me in the late 90s. I still use these for software I find particularly irksome, for example Conscrewence from AtlASSian.

It was always "Microshit" to me

Internet exploder

Internet Exploiter

In french we have Windaube (pronunced Windob).

Daube is a slang word for something of low quality.

> Daube is a slang word for something of low quality.

Which is fun because it's also a really delicious dish from Provence (south of France) made with beef that has been marinated for multiple hours in red wine.

in Italy it was WinZozz (zozzo = dirty)

In Polish we used to say "Winzgroza" (win terror)

I always like Wangblows

In Brazil people used to say "Ruindows", which is a play with the portuguese word for bad.

Cocô-pilot would work here

MS-DOS itself is derived from QDOS, which stands for "Quick and Dirty Operating System".

Things only went downhill from there.

Microscope Winblows

I was partial to Micro$haft.

Orgs have had sensitive skin like this for a long time. Gamespy was a service for launching and playing multiplayer games with lobbies before Steam, and if you “accidentally” typed “GaySpy” (it was the early 2000s) it would autocorrect to “GameSpy” by the time it appeared in your messages.

I used M$ at work the other day by accident, I was like ooh wait this isn't turn of the century slashdot.

From my parent's home in Wyoming I stab at thee!

https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2002/07/22/m

I find it interesting to go back in time so I read the accompanying article and came across this snippet:

> despite the computing apocalypse that Windows XP's Product Activation features were supposed to ignite, I've never had the first problem with it

At the time, I remember a lot of scare stories about how the Product Activation system in Windows XP would result in the death of user freedom. It didn’t effect me because I was using GNU/Linux (probably Mandrake or Mandriva Linux). When I later got a job in an office that ran Windows XP, I don’t remember XP causing any more headaches than any of its predecessors. If anything, it was even more stable than 2000 which itself was superior to 95, 98 or 98SE.

I also fully agree with the last sentence:

> I do think it's clear that the way we use our computers totally pisses off gigantic, wealthy companies of all stripes, and it was only a matter of time until they tried to do something about it.

Part of it was that Microsoft was really more concerned with distributors selling computers with pirated copies of Windows, and they basically would activate anything if you were willing to call.

I remember doing it a few times for the "OEM" Windows XP which was cheaper but not supposed to migrate to new machines.

Thanks for that bit of background. That make sense.

I used to think that MS were probably happy with a certain amount of “piracy” (students, voluntary groups, people starting off as self-employed contractors, etc.) because it kept people in their ecosystem (using MS Office and other Windows-only software), helped reinforce the perception of Windows as being the OS for getting stuff done (either work or games) and some of these “pirates” would become future (paying) customers.

They really were - the biggest things were companies selling PCs with pirated software on them, and larger businesses buying one copy for everyone (where the fabled and famous audits came from). MS was never as big a stickler as Oracle in that regard.

Of course, if you were an avowed pirate, nothing even slowed you down.

Lol, I was thinking about that comic just yesterday, what a coincidence. "As you have no doubt been monitoring my communications for quite some time!" read in the voice of the pharmacy owner from Family Guy.

Reminds me of how, whenever I see a comment on an Internet forum where someone writes "u" and "ur" for "you" and "you are", I naturally read it phonetically as "ooh" and "urr", and it sounds a bit like the style of language traditionally used in fiction to represent the primitive speech of cavepeople, and I imagine the author typing the comment using the numeric pad on a turn-of-the-century Nokia candybar phone (though even those had autocomplete).

And never forget the fabled alot:

https://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2010/04/alot-is-bette...

there was an old humour piece on /. about how their name appeared so many times in their products that it took up a significant amount of space, so they were remaining themselves "moft" to save five bytes per instance. for some reason that stuck with me, I still find myself randomly thinking of them as moft every now and then.

Moft doesn't sound too out-of-place for the current start-up name landscape. I can already imagine "At Moft, we are building an AI-first data platform and agent marketplace at scale, because we know what businesses like yours need most."

Been in this industry since I graduated college, I have never stopped using Micro$oft or Microshaft. Also a fan of M$, Winblows…

Thank goodness their employees have time to crack down on people making fun of them on fucking Discord. That should definitely be the priority of a multi-trillion dollar software company, is making sure your users aren’t mocking you. We don’t need a taskbar that works reliably or anything.

My favorite nickname for MS-DOS is "Domestos" (pronounced /də ˈmɛs ˌtɒs/) which is a brand of bathroom cleanee from the UK.

Keep the windows open when using Vim on a Domes-Tos system.

[Domestos is a brand name for bleach, and Vim is a scouring powder that was popular decades ago]

I'm starting to use Micro$lop now

Every dominant tech company eventually gets the nickname treatment

One of my favorites being Micros~1, in reference to how Windows had to mangle file names for DOS's 8+3 character limit.

That and PROGRA~1 brings back memories.

definitely the nerdiest one hahaha

If I recall correctly, this was especially common around the time of the antitrust trial, with the possibility of Microsoft being split into a Micros~1 and Micros~2.

I remember it being used in speculative discussions around which units might end up where.

“i'll spell it MICRO$LOTH WINBLOWS in a DELICIOUS TWIST” https://leisuretown.com/library/qac/25.jpg

I actually still have one of these shirts in a box somewhere: https://www.kmfms.com

I remember one meme image that contained a bar chart where the X axis had Gahnoo Linux and Migrosoft Wendys and the Y axis was just labeled "good". Gahnoo Linux maxed out the good while Migrosoft Wendys bottomed out.

As an italian, I like Winzoz, a fusion between Windows and "zozzeria", filth.

I usually upgrade that to Micro$hit

It amazes me that 2026 corporations still choose MS Windows as their base for operations.. together with the Mordor 365 as the mail platform.

In a world without walls or fences, who needs Windows or Gates?