{"id":112409,"date":"2026-06-09T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-06-09T14:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/?p=112409"},"modified":"2026-06-09T14:23:21","modified_gmt":"2026-06-09T21:23:21","slug":"20260609-00","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20260609-00\/?p=112409","title":{"rendered":"The Microsoft Company Party where everybody played name tag swap"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;t know, it wasn&#8217;t hard to find a mutual acquaintance who could track them down and introduce you.<\/p>\n<p>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 &#8220;<a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Gary_Kildall\">Gary Kildall<\/a>&#8221; name tag. I don&#8217;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 &#8220;Gary Kildall&#8221; name tag and eagerly swapped his name tag for it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Even the boss got into the festivities.<\/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-112409","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-history"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"<p>Even the boss got into the festivities.<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112409","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=112409"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112409\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":112410,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/112409\/revisions\/112410"}],"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=112409"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=112409"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=112409"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}