{"id":111275,"date":"2025-06-17T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-06-17T14:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/?p=111275"},"modified":"2025-06-17T06:38:28","modified_gmt":"2025-06-17T13:38:28","slug":"20250617-00","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20250617-00\/?p=111275","title":{"rendered":"Funding the Egghead store shopping spree took a little extra legwork"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Some time ago, I told the story of the time the development manager for Windows 95 <a title=\"Buying an entire Egghead Software store\" href=\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20050824-11\/?p=34463\"> bought one copy of every PC program in the Egghead Software store<\/a> and <a title=\"Application compatibility for Windows 95 crashed a cash register\" href=\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20250610-00\/?p=111260\"> crashed the cash register<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Funding this shopping spree was itself a bit of an adventure.<\/p>\n<p>The development manager brazenly sent email directly to Bill Gates asking for an open purchase order for $1 million. Bill readily agreed.<\/p>\n<p>You&#8217;d think that would have settled it, but the Microsoft finance people kept blocking the creation of the purchase order. Bill himself had to intervene and personally approve the order.<\/p>\n<p>I suspect that part of that purchase order was used to provide the credit line for <a title=\"The credit card with a half-million-dollar credit limit\" href=\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20130709-00\/?p=3853\"> the credit card with a half-million-dollar credit limit<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Bonus punch line for the credit card story: The last name of the administrative assistant who was issued the half-million-dollar credit card happened to be Gates (no relation). She told me at the time, &#8220;It&#8217;s surprising how nice people in the Seattle area are to you once they find out that your last name is Gates.&#8221;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Just ask the boss.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2],"class_list":["post-111275","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-history"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"<p>Just ask the boss.<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111275","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=111275"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111275\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=111275"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=111275"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=111275"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}