6 ms·

Winpopup (2001)

43 points by susam 2y ago

anotheryou 2y ago
ahhh, IT lessons at school. That was our local chat tool.
- totallywrong 2y ago
  s/chat/cheat in my school.
ogurechny 2y ago
In other words, "net send". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Messenger_service https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Messenger_service
baal80spam 2y ago
Ahh, the memories. Abusing "net send" in WinNT 4.0 in my first workplace was our daily pastime (all other chat apps were forbidden).
- jeffgreco 2y ago
  A friend at high school was suspended after discovering the whole district shared a network and spammed our rival school with messages.
  - kromokromo 2y ago
    It was only a matter of time, with opportunities like that - what did they expect?
    - gnat 2y ago
      Adults underestimate the trouble a kid will cause from boredom and curiosity and self-centredness. It’s a self-serving underestimate (the less trouble we anticipate, the less we need to do now). Pay in school IT isn’t great and frequently there’s a hobbyist going “I can make this [glorious thing] possible” and not thinking ahead to “and I also make this [annoying/ destructive/ unlawful/ inconvenient thing] possible”. Extension to the wider software industry left as exercise to the reader.
  - ambentzen 2y ago
    I did that in 8th grade across 3 schools that shared a network. Got my laptop privileges revoked for a few months. It was just a batch script where I had copy/pasted the same line over and over again, no fancy loops.
- z500 2y ago
  I was pretty sure I was about to get in trouble when I messaged "wake up" to a kid that fell asleep at his computer and he called the teacher over. The computers were named numerically and in the same order they were laid out in the room, so they could have looked at the printed label on his machine, and the name of the machine the message came from, and counted over to me just as easily as I counted over to him, but they just puzzled over it for a second and dropped it.
ilvez 2y ago
Unix Talk [1] in terminal only class in university, because telnet talkers were already too much.. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk_(software)
justanother 2y ago
Kinda related old guy story time: My high school had a small room full of 286es running Novell, which was dated even for its time. I was a self-taught nerd who took intro-to-programming classes to goose my GPA easily (it didn't help, I dropped out anyway, but that's a whole other story). Anyway, I had been exposed to early IRC and BITNet Relay and decided I could clone it easily by just appending a chat log to an ever-growing file on the Novell network, and the 'clients' would just periodically check this file for growth and print the new bytes. Once one important bug was fixed (you couldn't check the file too often or you'd melt the Novell server), the chat program was permanently installed as a plague upon the high-school programming classes. Novell had its own popup messaging in text mode, but they'd already locked it down due to student shenanigans, but this was a group chat that could be made to work wherever there was a world-readable Novell share, and iirc the network wouldn't function properly without at least one (the 'mail' directories? idk it's been awhile). Gosh I was so proud. I never directly caused any computer problems in high school, but damn if they didn't try to find a way to blame me for every foul wind that blew. They deserved my little group-chat annoyance.
splitbrain 2y ago
Ah the memories. I wrote my own net send receiver (eg. a winpopup without the sending capabilities) back in the days: https://www.splitbrain.org/projects/popupmessage https://www.splitbrain.org/projects/popupmessage IIRC it was used briefly in the hospital I worked at as a way to send messages to specific workstations.
jsiepkes 2y ago
In the early days of ADSL in the Netherlands all PC's got a public IP when they connected. Winpopup was a lot of fun those days...
Ciantic 2y ago
I even got a call from a person who received one of the popups over the internet. Because the message had my name on it. I just happened to have a common name in Finland, and the receiver dug up my phone number and called. Of course, it was not me who sent the popup, but it was pretty amusing to explain that indeed it was not me, and I gave instructions on how to disable the 'feature' completely.
xanderlewis 2y ago
Just looking at these screenshots makes me wish computers were still so (relatively) simple. I’m no Windows fan, but it’s so soothingly retro.
- jsiepkes 2y ago
  Don't get too sentimental. Windows 98 didn't really have any real memory protection. Meaning every process could modify all kinds of memory they shouldn't (kernel, other proceses, etc.). Hence kernel panics (aka "blue screens") were quite common. They usually happend multiple times a week. Auto-save also wasn't really a thing. I still have a "CTRL - S" reflex whenever I have some form of editor open.
  - xanderlewis 2y ago
    But… skeuomorphism and crispy lines of pixels! And cute sound effects.
  - CalRobert 2y ago
    You could use it with only a local account though.
    - theandrewbailey 2y ago
      Oh no! What will I do without my cloud account, telemetry, and ads?
      - CalRobert 2y ago
        General purpose computing, you miscreant!
  - thawkth 2y ago
    I think they're right about the interface itself, and agree with you wholeheartedly about the technical problems of the time. NT was a massive leap forward and it amazes me how long it existed before Microsoft could merge the consumer and business spaces in XP. That said, something to be said for truly feeling in control of your own computer and not worrying at all about what it's doing behind your back (or what might change without you knowing in the next update!)
mtlynch 2y ago
Are there some shenanigans here with the publication date? The screenshots looked surprisingly large and high-quality for something published in 2001. I looked up the page in the Internet Archive, and there's no record of its publication before today: https://web.archive.org/web/20240000000000*/https://susam.net/winpopup.html https://web.archive.org/web/20240000000000*/https://susam.ne...
- roelschroeven 2y ago
  The screenshots are 640x480. That's most likely simply a full screen screenshot. The whole style of the write-up looks much more modern than 2001 though. I assume it was first published on a different URL and with a different style (or at least it would very much surprise that someone would write about Winpopup nowadays).
  - mtlynch 2y ago
    That's true, I guess it's more the quality. Were people publishing lossless PNG screenshots in 2001? My memory of screenshots of that time was that they were super compressed GIFs and JPEGs.
    - roelschroeven 2y ago
      Right, good question. I can't remember where in time the transition was from small heavily compressed to high quality full size images in relation to 2001, nor when exactly the transition to PNG was. But now that I think about, 2001 seems early indeed. I agree: something is weird.
- susam 2y ago
  Hello! The article is indeed from 2001 from a different site of mine. The post was imported into my current blog a couple of years ago when I was consolidating my different websites into one. The screenshots were added at the same time. I thought it might be a good idea to illustrate what the software looked like by taking screenshots of Windows 98 in an emulator. To avoid any confusion, I'll add an update date to the article, clarifying that the screenshots were not obtained in 2001. Thanks for calling this out!
dnos 2y ago
Gotta love "net send". I just recently watched an old episode of The Screensavers from 2002 where Kevin Rose talked about potential spam abuse of computers connected to the internet with the service enabled. If you got some nostalgia from this Winpopup post, it's definitely worth watching! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgNUhIy78Ro https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgNUhIy78Ro
bitwize 2y ago
Holy crap, workgroups. I remember those. Opening up other kids' shared folders in college and finding pirated software, someone's collection of MTM files they composed... porn...

Winpopup (2001)

43 points by susam 2y ago

anotheryou 2y ago

ahhh, IT lessons at school. That was our local chat tool.

totallywrong 2y ago
s/chat/cheat in my school.

ogurechny 2y ago

In other words, "net send". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Messenger_service https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Messenger_service

baal80spam 2y ago

Ahh, the memories. Abusing "net send" in WinNT 4.0 in my first workplace was our daily pastime (all other chat apps were forbidden).

jeffgreco 2y ago
A friend at high school was suspended after discovering the whole district shared a network and spammed our rival school with messages.
- kromokromo 2y ago
  It was only a matter of time, with opportunities like that - what did they expect?
  - gnat 2y ago
    Adults underestimate the trouble a kid will cause from boredom and curiosity and self-centredness. It’s a self-serving underestimate (the less trouble we anticipate, the less we need to do now). Pay in school IT isn’t great and frequently there’s a hobbyist going “I can make this [glorious thing] possible” and not thinking ahead to “and I also make this [annoying/ destructive/ unlawful/ inconvenient thing] possible”. Extension to the wider software industry left as exercise to the reader.
- ambentzen 2y ago
  I did that in 8th grade across 3 schools that shared a network. Got my laptop privileges revoked for a few months. It was just a batch script where I had copy/pasted the same line over and over again, no fancy loops.
z500 2y ago
I was pretty sure I was about to get in trouble when I messaged "wake up" to a kid that fell asleep at his computer and he called the teacher over. The computers were named numerically and in the same order they were laid out in the room, so they could have looked at the printed label on his machine, and the name of the machine the message came from, and counted over to me just as easily as I counted over to him, but they just puzzled over it for a second and dropped it.

ilvez 2y ago

Unix Talk [1] in terminal only class in university, because telnet talkers were already too much.. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk_(software)

justanother 2y ago

Kinda related old guy story time: My high school had a small room full of 286es running Novell, which was dated even for its time. I was a self-taught nerd who took intro-to-programming classes to goose my GPA easily (it didn't help, I dropped out anyway, but that's a whole other story). Anyway, I had been exposed to early IRC and BITNet Relay and decided I could clone it easily by just appending a chat log to an ever-growing file on the Novell network, and the 'clients' would just periodically check this file for growth and print the new bytes. Once one important bug was fixed (you couldn't check the file too often or you'd melt the Novell server), the chat program was permanently installed as a plague upon the high-school programming classes. Novell had its own popup messaging in text mode, but they'd already locked it down due to student shenanigans, but this was a group chat that could be made to work wherever there was a world-readable Novell share, and iirc the network wouldn't function properly without at least one (the 'mail' directories? idk it's been awhile). Gosh I was so proud. I never directly caused any computer problems in high school, but damn if they didn't try to find a way to blame me for every foul wind that blew. They deserved my little group-chat annoyance.

splitbrain 2y ago

Ah the memories. I wrote my own net send receiver (eg. a winpopup without the sending capabilities) back in the days: https://www.splitbrain.org/projects/popupmessage https://www.splitbrain.org/projects/popupmessage IIRC it was used briefly in the hospital I worked at as a way to send messages to specific workstations.

jsiepkes 2y ago

In the early days of ADSL in the Netherlands all PC's got a public IP when they connected. Winpopup was a lot of fun those days...

Ciantic 2y ago

I even got a call from a person who received one of the popups over the internet. Because the message had my name on it. I just happened to have a common name in Finland, and the receiver dug up my phone number and called. Of course, it was not me who sent the popup, but it was pretty amusing to explain that indeed it was not me, and I gave instructions on how to disable the 'feature' completely.

xanderlewis 2y ago

Just looking at these screenshots makes me wish computers were still so (relatively) simple. I’m no Windows fan, but it’s so soothingly retro.

jsiepkes 2y ago
Don't get too sentimental. Windows 98 didn't really have any real memory protection. Meaning every process could modify all kinds of memory they shouldn't (kernel, other proceses, etc.). Hence kernel panics (aka "blue screens") were quite common. They usually happend multiple times a week. Auto-save also wasn't really a thing. I still have a "CTRL - S" reflex whenever I have some form of editor open.
- xanderlewis 2y ago
  But… skeuomorphism and crispy lines of pixels! And cute sound effects.
- CalRobert 2y ago
  You could use it with only a local account though.
  - theandrewbailey 2y ago
    Oh no! What will I do without my cloud account, telemetry, and ads?
    - CalRobert 2y ago
      General purpose computing, you miscreant!
- thawkth 2y ago
  I think they're right about the interface itself, and agree with you wholeheartedly about the technical problems of the time. NT was a massive leap forward and it amazes me how long it existed before Microsoft could merge the consumer and business spaces in XP. That said, something to be said for truly feeling in control of your own computer and not worrying at all about what it's doing behind your back (or what might change without you knowing in the next update!)

mtlynch 2y ago

Are there some shenanigans here with the publication date? The screenshots looked surprisingly large and high-quality for something published in 2001. I looked up the page in the Internet Archive, and there's no record of its publication before today: https://web.archive.org/web/20240000000000*/https://susam.net/winpopup.html https://web.archive.org/web/20240000000000*/https://susam.ne...

roelschroeven 2y ago
The screenshots are 640x480. That's most likely simply a full screen screenshot. The whole style of the write-up looks much more modern than 2001 though. I assume it was first published on a different URL and with a different style (or at least it would very much surprise that someone would write about Winpopup nowadays).
- mtlynch 2y ago
  That's true, I guess it's more the quality. Were people publishing lossless PNG screenshots in 2001? My memory of screenshots of that time was that they were super compressed GIFs and JPEGs.
  - roelschroeven 2y ago
    Right, good question. I can't remember where in time the transition was from small heavily compressed to high quality full size images in relation to 2001, nor when exactly the transition to PNG was. But now that I think about, 2001 seems early indeed. I agree: something is weird.
susam 2y ago
Hello! The article is indeed from 2001 from a different site of mine. The post was imported into my current blog a couple of years ago when I was consolidating my different websites into one. The screenshots were added at the same time. I thought it might be a good idea to illustrate what the software looked like by taking screenshots of Windows 98 in an emulator. To avoid any confusion, I'll add an update date to the article, clarifying that the screenshots were not obtained in 2001. Thanks for calling this out!

dnos 2y ago

Gotta love "net send". I just recently watched an old episode of The Screensavers from 2002 where Kevin Rose talked about potential spam abuse of computers connected to the internet with the service enabled. If you got some nostalgia from this Winpopup post, it's definitely worth watching! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgNUhIy78Ro https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgNUhIy78Ro

bitwize 2y ago

Holy crap, workgroups. I remember those. Opening up other kids' shared folders in college and finding pirated software, someone's collection of MTM files they composed... porn...