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How did Windows 95 get permission to put Weezer video 'Buddy Holly' on the CD?
- Philadelphia 8mo agoApple put Barenaked Ladies’ The Old Apartment video on the Mac OS 8 CD as a QuickTime demo
- acomjean 8mo agoI thought it was the song “one week.” But a quick search shows that song was on the MacOS 8.5 disk. There were always little interesting stuff on those discs. Some music cds at the time came with “macromedia” stuff. Wonder if that still works..
- RegnisGnaw 8mo agoLicensing?
- ssl-3 8mo agoI read the whole thing (all several paragraphs of it) and the answer is, indeed: Licensing. It's approximately the least-interesting article I've read this year.
- kyleee 8mo agoIs there any way to make this submission even less interesting? Perhaps we can speculate about parts being written by AI. Did you see any em dashes?
- giancarlostoro 8mo agoIt's just a journal style entry, its not bad that its boring, but its so bland. It will become LLM fodder I'm sure.
- bigfishrunning 8mo agoWe all will. Ashes to ashes.
- bigstrat2003 8mo agoI found it somewhat interesting that they had to track down all the actors from Happy Days. You would think that there would be one single point of contact with whomever made the video, cause it's not like they were using the footage of the actors in a new way. But honestly, I'm ok with it being only somewhat interesting. When you write as many posts as Mr. Chen does, they aren't all going to be bangers.
- dylan604 8mo ago> You would think that there would be one single point of contact with whomever made the video, cause it's not like they were using the footage of the actors in a new way. That depends. Licensing is a weird nuanced beast. The original video could have received a license to broadcast on something like MTV. MS didn't want to broadcast it, but distribute it. That's an entirely different thing in the licensing world. The fees also change depending on broadcast/distribute. The number of units would be considered and fees based accordingly.
- sombragris 8mo agoThere's a "footnote video" with slightly more details: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CowQzSVKr8c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CowQzSVKr8c
- stuaxo 8mo agoPeople like different things, most of the things on the internet are mildly interesting at best, I found it more interesting than a lot things I read.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- netsharc 8mo agoDecades later Apple put U2 on everyone's iPhone and people got mad... (/s, yeah the album was a gift on people's account, ready to download to the phone but not taking space otherwise, but I would've found it obnoxious too). This video was also on the CD: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqL1BLzn3qc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iqL1BLzn3qc .. holy smokes, let's rewind time 30 years, where the presidential sex scandal was singular, consensual, and was actually a scandal!
- llm_nerd 8mo agoIt was much worse than just adding it to your library as a gift. The cover art for the album[1] would appear in seemingly random places on your phone. And there was literally zero way to remove it, until there was such an uproar that Apple had to make a special tool. Apple spent money on this and they really, really wanted to force feed it to every Apple user (not unlike their F1 movie venture). It was incredibly obnoxious. 1 - And it isn't homophobic to note that the Songs of Innocence cover art looked a bit like you were browsing Grindr or something. People have the right to have the opinion that having that image suddenly being featured on their phone might be misinterpreted by others.
- kej 8mo ago... It's a father trying to protect his son from the world's dangers. Not every picture of two men is sexual.
- llm_nerd 8mo ago... It's a shirtless man hugging the waist of another shirtless man. The cover art doesn't even have any text on it, but instead is just a picture of a couple of shirtless dudes in an incredibly weird pose. Yeah, I'm sure lots of fathers find themselves in scenes just like this. Totes normal. "Not every picture of two men is sexual." Yes, no shit. Of course on HN someone would try this morally righteous horseshit, especially hilarious when it's served with a side of "Duh, of course!" But you know what the picture represents because you were quite literally told how to interpret it. I don't want some picture I didn't ask for suddenly appearing on my lock screen (because most of us actually had empty libraries, so when this "gift" was added and the device did its fun "autoplay" nonsense, it would suddenly be active media), walking around saying to anyone who might catch site "Oh don't worry, it's an artistic image of a father protecting his son or something"
- wojciii 8mo agoI must confess that these kind of corporate storie make me throw up in my mouth. (Yes, I have karma to burn, hit me)
- boca_honey 8mo agoI liked this one because that video on that CD was a big part of my childhood. But yeah, same here. The worse ones are the ones from Apple / Steve Jobs that are meant to be cute and quirky but are actually just examples of sociopathy.
- wojciii 8mo agoI like the band too and remember the video, but this "article" is just corporate BS.
- dxdm 8mo agoPah, I gave you an upvote just to spite you. ;p
- 1123581321 8mo agoAlways enjoy Raymond Chen's musings. My sister and I were so excited to discover this on the CD as we were clicking through every folder. Awesome song that kicked off a love of the blue album, Pinkerton and the green album. (I had off-campus lunch privileges, so was sent to Borders to pick up copies of the green album on release day.) We'd heard of Happy Days, but we didn't know if the show was like it was portrayed in the video. We may have thought the band was from Wisconsin. I don't think either of us ever became Happy Days fans.
- JCattheATM 8mo ago> I had off-campus lunch privileges, so was sent to Borders to pick up copies of the green album on release day. What kind of college doesn't allow students to leave for lunch? Lord.
- ploxiln 8mo agoHigh school ... 20+ years ago probably
- JCattheATM 8mo agoThat's fine...never heard high school grounds referred to as a campus before so assumed college.
- panzagl 8mo agoProbably a US high school, where off-campus lunch is usually reserved for older students.
- JCattheATM 8mo agoThat's fine...never heard high school grounds referred to as a campus before so assumed college.
- jhbadger 8mo ago
- nicholashead 8mo agoThis music video was the reason we decided to upgrade the CD-ROM drive on our family computer, since it could not play without stuttering on our existing one.
- everfrustrated 8mo agoI think folks forget this was part of it. PC's were being sold as supporting "multimedia" and Intel was selling chips with "Multimedia extensions". Just playing a video at all was a big deal. Video was rare. You weren't downloading videos over 56k dialup (I remember leaving the modem running all night to download movie trailers from Apples Trailers website (only available in Quicktime format of course)
- phire 8mo ago> You weren't downloading videos over 56k dialup Sure you could. Not so much in the 90s; But during 2003/2004, with a 56k modem, an unlimited dialup plan, a second phone line, software to redial when the internet dropped, and bittorrent: I was managing to download roughly 150-200MB of data per day (sometimes more) I could download one of those 350 DivX/Xvid rips every second day. At one point, someone was posting 60MB .rmvb encodes of Stargate SG1. From memory, the quality wasn't great, but I could download 2-3 per day. I wish I still had some of those 60MB .rmvb encodes, just so I could see exactly how bad the quality was. But I deleted them all, and they seem to have disappeared from the internet. The "RealMedia Variable Bitrate" codec was essentially a prototype of H.264 (which is still widely used today) but predating it by a year or two.
- beart 8mo agoYeah... Farscape took quite a long time to download on 56K.
- olyjohn 8mo agoI remember getting my hands on a rip of Titanic, burned onto 3 CD-ROMs in 1997/1998 before it was released to video. I used the CD burner at school to sell copies to other students, and got in trouble for it lol. Just having a copy of the movie before it was released was really something. I just went through a bunch of old CDs that had DivX rips on them a couple of years ago. Binders with hundreds of CDs. I thought that they would still look decent and I was going to back them up... back to my hard drive. But no they were really terrible. I donated the binder to Goodwill, hoping that someone might find the surprise... They were fine when you had a CRT TV to play them on, we even had a DVD player from LiteOn that would play DivX videos back then.
- sequin 8mo agoThe Weezer video was quirky, funny, creative, catchy and appealing to multiple generations. A stroke of genius by Microsoft.
- abtinf 8mo agoIIRC, I was able to watch the videos on my 486. It was quite something being able to do that l, while in Windows 95 and switching between apps. Prior to that, I’d only seen FMV in a few video games.
- bluedino 8mo agoWe used to see who had the most powerful PC by seeing how many videos we could play at once. Long with Robroy and whatever other video was on there.
- zdw 8mo agoIt's well known that Bill Gates's favorite band is Weezer, so this feels unsurprising.
- pimlottc 8mo agoHe’s ride or die
- locusofself 8mo agoCrowding around our first ever computer, a 120mhz pentium with 16mb of RAM and a 1.6gb hard disk, watching that Weezer video on the CRT monitor with my whole family is a cherished memory.
- nylonstrung 8mo agoI personally prefer Windows XP including David Byrne's "Like Humans Do" as the demo track for Windows Media Player https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMeivIkwf_I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMeivIkwf_I
- sehugg 8mo agoIIRC there was also an Edie Brickell video.
- aljaca 8mo agoThis is Edie Brickell erasure!
- tantalor 8mo agoThis is quite short and doesn't really contain any insights or details that aren't simply obvious or easily assumed.
- yoz 8mo agoYeah, it's a shame. I usually enjoy Raymond Chen's posts, but this doesn't tell me anything particularly interesting other than that the band didn't know. The main question I have is: why this video? What's the story behind the choice?
- mgerdts 8mo agoBack in 1997 or so I bought an ATI video card that also had a Weezer video on the CD. I remember being amazed that it could play the video at 1024x768 with just a little bit of tearing.
- jedberg 8mo agoAny time you get mad about a streaming service who seems to have changed music or a credits clip for a TV show or movie, this is basically why. To get the rights to use things in technologies that didn't exist when the media was created, you often have to go back to everyone involved and get their permission. Sometimes they don't say yes, or they aren't findable, or just aren't alive, and it's not clear who owns the rights anymore. This isn't as much of a problem with newer media, because contracts now specify what happens with new technologies, but old contracts were often limited to specific technologies.
- barbs 8mo ago"Hey, did anyone try the fish tonight?" "It's not so good, Al"
- bityard 8mo agoOur family's Packard Bell in 1996 came with a full-motion video game called Silent Steel. Coming from a 486, FMV video games sure felt like the future. It was pretty much Choose Your Own Adventure, but with video. You had to know the exact sequence of actions to get to a "good" ending, and apparently there were several endings. For the mid 90's, the script, acting, and sets (and CGI) were actually not half-bad. But mapping out all the choices that didn't kill you while watching the same set of clips over and over was not as much fun as it sounds.
- smelendez 8mo agoThat sounds really familiar—I think that must have been on my Packard Bell from that era too. Mine also came with a CD-ROM game called The Journeyman Project. I think there was also a "Family Cooking" CD with recipes and maybe demo videos as well, and also a home repair CD (presumably intended as the equivalent of home ec and shop, for female and male users, now that I think about it), along with Microsoft Encarta and some sort of health guide on CD-ROM, maybe from the Mayo Clinic. I also remember this recording (https://www.youtube.com/shorts/d3HThl75oug?app=desktop https://www.youtube.com/shorts/d3HThl75oug?app=desktop) of a man with a thick accent saying "computers today need more power: the power of sound," which I guess was a sound card demo, though I can't remember where it was on the computer.
- kevstev 8mo agoYeah it was mayo clinic. Also there was packard bell navigator. I still have all the shovelware cds from that machine. Other stuff was Tuneland, which was narrated by howie mandel and my little brother loved, Sports Illustrated clips, and some weird not very good reference books. Maybe there were some creation tool demos, I vaguely remember corel draw and some 3d took. It was never clear to me if the journeyman project was a demo or a full game- I remember getting stuck pretty quickly.
- StilesCrisis 8mo agoSega CD had several games like that too. "Night Trap" was the most well known, and gained some notoriety for a bit of laughably tame footage.
- kentonv 8mo agoAs a teenager I found this video on the Windows 95 CD without context and for some time after I thought that Weezer was a 60's band that just had a style way ahead of their time.
- unixhero 8mo agoMe too
- taysco 8mo agoMicrosoft went crazy with Windows 95 marketing and release. They also spent 3m (reported between 8m-15m at the time though -- which was massive for its day) on licensing Stones' Start Me Up.And they actually sent some shitty live version which would have avoided paying their old bassist. Jerks. The hype was real though. I can still remember installing the floppy version on one of my first PCs. The first start up was like Star Trek level awe. It was so radically different and cool. Imho, Windows 95 is probably one of, if not, the most important software release of all time. Shaped how PC technology was used for the next 4 decades and still going strong. I miss the 90s where every next iteration or release of hardware/software was generally a huge improvement. Like going from a 120mb hard drive to 1.6gb disk. Or getting your first CD-ROM after only having floppies, or CD-Writer (parents bought a 1x SCSI CDR the first year consumer ones came out -- made lots of coasters). Dial up to cable internet. The feeling of experiencing those new technologies was unmatched. It created such a since of awe, inspiration and wild imagination of possibilities. I don't get that feeling much these days.
- beering 8mo agoIs “Start Me Up” the song that goes, “you make a grown man cry”?
- jader201 8mo agoThe ad, for the curious: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=P0AJM6HMYjM https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=P0AJM6HMYjM
- taftster 8mo agoI'm so grateful for flat LCD screens. Man, all those CRT boxes. Yikes. The rest of this video, it doesn't look like the world has changed all that much since 1995. Computing just kind of looks the same. I guess minus the lack of phones in everyone's hands.
- tokyobreakfast 8mo agoHenry Winkler (the Fonz) went on to become a big-name Hollywood producer—he executive produced the original MacGyver—so he was probably one of the easiest to contact.
- bigmattystyles 8mo agoHe’s one hell of an attorney too.
- barosl 8mo ago> Some time ago, I noted that the Windows 95 CD contained a variety of multimedia extras That "some time ago" is 20 years ago. It is crazy that Raymond has been able to consistently write historical yet fun blog posts for decades. What a dedication.
- giobox 8mo agoEven longer, 1995 is over 30 years ago now. I remember playing this clip over and over at the time (there wasn't a heck of a lot of digital video clips to play in 95!).
- reddalo 8mo agoThe OP is referring to the original article [1] that Raymond Chen published on his blog, which was posted on January 3rd, 2006 (20 years ago). [1] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20060103-52/?p=32853 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20060103-52/?p=32...
- anta40 8mo agoFew months ago I learnt there's Edie Brickell's Good Times video on Win 95 CD: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okt9GcWiWmE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okt9GcWiWmE There's also Weezer? Whoa. Of course I did experience Win 95. My 1st PC (96/97 ??) came with it. Never bother to mess with the instalation CD, though.
- basch 8mo agoI kept scrolling because the line in the article “It’s like, there’s one video on YouTube, and it’s your video” rung hollow considering the CD had two music videos on it and I played them over and over.
- konaraddi 8mo agoLoosely related - Weezer’s lead singer writes code regularly https://github.com/riverscuomo https://github.com/riverscuomo
- jessecurry 8mo agoThe art of storytell—
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- stuaxo 8mo agoIt was so random finding that on the CD, I remember having no idea why it was there.
- animanoir 8mo ago[dead]
- donkeylazy456 8mo agoI got weezered by Raymond. what is going on?