8 ms·
The news footage is pretty convincing
by brundolf 6y ago
The news footage is pretty convincing
- coding123 6y agoI'm assuming Seattlites would be able to confirm. 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.
- brundolf 6y agoRemember 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
- iso1210 6y agoUsenet would have, there would be mentions on a pro or anti (mainly anti) microsoft group about it. It was 1996, not the stone age Google has lost a lot of old posts from those days, but I'd be surprised if it would have lost all of them.
- dannyw 6y agoGoogle'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.
- lupire 6y agoApril 1996 was a long time ago, almost the dawn of the Internet as it relates to Microsoft. Internet Explorer only launched in 1995, and the anti-Linux Halloween Documents were 1998.
- iso1210 6y ago> 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.
- WalterBright 6y agoI 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.
- Someone 6y ago1989, I guess. https://youtube.com/watch?v=Xeio-CJ0qZ8 https://youtube.com/watch?v=Xeio-CJ0qZ8
- WalterBright 6y agoI miss Almost Live. When KING would run reruns of it, they never did that one. Anyhow, they stopped all AL reruns a year or two ago. Sad.
- desi_ninja 6y agothis has more details of what happened on that April's fools day https://www.seattlemet.com/arts-and-culture/2013/05/an-oral-history-of-almost-live-june-2013 https://www.seattlemet.com/arts-and-culture/2013/05/an-oral-...
- WalterBright 6y agoSince 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.)
- reaperducer 6y agoI can't find anything in Google to confirm "Microsoft Coffee" except for this site, discussion of it on Reddit 13 hours ago. Its choice not to display any information older than the attention span of a cracked out chipmunk is one of the main reasons I stopped using Google.
- marshmallow_12 6y agoyou 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. "stale as buns" is my phrase of choice.
- dannyw 6y agoTry finding something from Google before 2007.
- marshmallow_12 6y ago"google in 1996"? Google likes the buns but not the whisky i guess. (even i'm cringing at the metaphor, but if you think about it, it sums up what i'm trying to say. Pretty well)
- brenschluss 6y agoReal question: do you use any alternatives? I completely agree but have had a hard time finding other methods of searching information.
- passivate 6y agoGoogle'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.
- orbital-decay 6y agoMost 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.
- passivate 6y agoEither way, it is funny that they claim to have millions of results, yet you can't go past Page 11.
- nitrogen 6y agoAt least it does go to eleven. Most amps only go to ten. I hope that if you're being serious about 11 being the max, that it was a deliberate reference.
- passivate 6y agoTouche! :)
- lupire 6y agoThat's not true. You just have to click the "with the omited results included" at the bottom of page 11, and that gives you many more pages.
- passivate 6y agoOh, 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.
- IncRnd 6y agoI 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.
- Zanni 6y agoHere you go. Third result for me, searching for "ad for turbo pascal in byte magazine" (which is where I first remember seeing it): http://tech-insider.org/personal-computers/research/acrobat/8311.pdf http://tech-insider.org/personal-computers/research/acrobat/...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- devindotcom 6y agoEgghead 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.
- DanBC 6y agoThere's a bunch of real MS promotional merch that doesn't show up in search engines. In the 1990s they released "drag 'n' drops" - a gummy candy in the shape of dragons. I can't find any mention of them.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- dpifke 6y agoTo 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.
- honkdaddy 6y agoYeah - 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.
- weaksauce 6y ago> the VHS look 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
- WalterBright 6y agoYou'd also have to duplicate 90's hairstyles and clothing, which isn't that easy.
- WalterBright 6y agoI 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.
- exhilaration 6y agoIf they faked that footage and even went as far faking the messed up VHS tracking, I will be very very impressed.
- iso1210 6y agoThe 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.
- gruez 6y ago>If you've waited for 25 years to announce something, you're going to get video captured correctly. maybe the tape degraded?
- whatthesmack 6y agoFormer 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.
- floren 6y agoGood call, this definitely looks like the same guy: https://komonews.com/station/people/keith-eldridge https://komonews.com/station/people/keith-eldridge
- DonHopkins 6y agoHas anyone contacted him and made him an offer on that box of Microsoft Coffee? He was right, it would be worth a lot now!
- tim333 6y agoIt's quite flickery. I don't remember TV/video being that bad in 96.
- bonzini 6y agoAnalog covered up how bad it was. IIRC VHS resolution was 320x240.
- aidenn0 6y agoNTSC 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). [edit] 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.
- iso1210 6y agoAnalog 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)
- anigbrowl 6y agoYou have lines and also an aspect ratio, which is 4:3.
- brabel 6y agoMaybe, 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).
- neonate 6y agoIt 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/ https://komonews.com/), to confirm that the clip is real.
- iso1210 6y agowhatthesmack confirmed the man was Keith Eldridge 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.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Exmoor 6y agoLifelong 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXIc5SQxG3o
- rancar2 6y agoWell, that was a lovely video in itself. Thanks for sharing.
- DonHopkins 6y agoI'm sure there's an AfterEffects plugin that does that! ;)
- neom 6y agoI just called KOMO. They confirmed they covered it, the footage is real, and it happened. In fact, the archives tech I talked to remembered it.
- ComodoHacker 6y agoBut can you believe them on April 1st?
- muterad_murilax 6y agoDude, it's (at least) April 2nd all around the globe right now...
- atleta 6y agoWell, 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.
- neom 6y agoI 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.
- atleta 6y agoCool! Thanks for the additional details.
- codetrotter 6y agoI as well thought you were just joking but that’s great!
- atleta 6y agoI 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.
- tsumnia 6y agoI'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.
- yosito 6y agoNo way. The VHS tracking effect is exaggerated and appears to be an attempt to hide artifacts of faked footage.