I learned from a long-retired Microsoft employee about a Company Party that took place around 1984 or so. The company was small enough that a single party could fit the entire company, but not so small that everybody knew everybody else, so each guest was issued a name tag.
During the evening, an unofficial game arose in which people started exchanging their name tags with others whom they met. It also served as a fun little conversation starter: If you swapped name tags with someone and ended up with the tag for somebody you didn’t know, it wasn’t hard to find a mutual acquaintance who could track them down and introduce you.
At one point, the employee who was retelling the story was in a group talking with Bill Gates, who was among the few attendees still wearing their original name tags. Bill spotted that one of the other people in the group had a “Gary Kildall” name tag. I don’t know whether Gary Kildall was actually invited to the party, or that somebody just created a Gary Kildall name tag as a joke. But Bill saw the “Gary Kildall” name tag and eagerly swapped his name tag for it.
I'm currently a sophomore in high school, getting ready for my A+ cert.
I just dug into one of the weirdest rabbit holes of Windows history I've ever been in ... sleep states and power management. Recently, I broke my power options (never thought I'd ever say this) and managed to completely remove my "sleep" option everywhere. Start, control panel, heck, even PowerShell refused it, telling me that a hypervisor was stopping me. A hypervisor? How could that be?
Turns out, I had a reg key called "PlatformAoAcOverride" set to one, where it really shouldn't exist on modern systems. That's...
Next up on Verdrahtet: How Bill Gates stole not only QDOS, but also the name tag of Gary Kildall. /sarcasm 🙂