During some downtime, I found that someone had remastered or AI’d or something’d the infamous Windows 1.0 commercial that’s been floating around YouTube almost since it started. The quality is a lot better than I’d ever seen it. Take a look for yourself.
Now, the YouTuber who posted it doesn’t say how they came into possession of this high-quality copy. Honestly it’s probably the best this video will ever look unless there’s some serious postprocessing added to it. They don’t claim to have used the original version as a source, and in fact I don’t think they did. I think they must have somehow gotten a version on tape or something that was closer to the original master. AI can do amazing things but it’s no way that you’ll get anything high quality when you start with this:
Look, I’,m in awe of the amazing things that someone like Peter Jackson could do with 16mm film for Get Back, but there’s no way (at least in 2023) that you could take that second video and turn it into the first video. Just not gonna happen.
The story behind this video
I think it’s funny that this video has somehow become shrouded in mystery. The first time I saw it, I think, was in YouTube’s early days and I pegged it as an immediate fake. Not to say it wasn’t produced, or that the person you see isn’t Steve Ballmer, but there’s no way that it was a legit commercial. There just wasn’t any question of that. Given that it never could have (and never did) air on TV, the only other logical explanation was that it was some sort of internal promo video.
That sort of thing was very common in those days. Just having a big screen behind you when you spoke at a convention was a rarity in the mid-1980s, but a company like Microsoft would certainly have done it. I can tell you that I was at the developer conference where IBM showed OS/2 Warp and they had some similar promotional stuff. So of course it was just a joke. I’m surprised anyone could think otherwise.
And yet YouTuber Michael MJD devotes an entire 10 minutes to analyzing the clues, before concluding that the video never would have aired in 1986. Take a look.
All I can say about that is, well it’s 3 words. The first is “no” and the last is “Sherlock” and if you might be able to guess the middle one.
Life experience turning into history
One of the more entertaining things I think that we all experience is having younger people explain things that happened in our lifetime, as if it were ancient history. There’s a persistent urban legend, for example, that our emergency number 9-1-1 was created to honor victims of the tragedies of September 11, 2001. Even the most cursory of searches proves this not to be true. But then, some of us don’t need to search to know that. If you were a fully formed human on September 10, 2001 then you know that the 9-1-1 emergency number had been around for 30 years or so.
As I trundle through life I find this sort of thing interesting. Why? Because it makes me generally question what I think of as history. We’re all taught a fairly monolithic view of past events. For example we’re taught that a bunch of patriots dumped tea into Boston Harbor. We are taught that this led directly to the American Revolution. There’s a lot more to all of those stories, that’s very clear. The truth is we probably only know about 10% of it. When I talk to my younger friends and coworkers, I find that they have a very skewed idea of events in my lifetime. I suppose that means my idea of events before my lifetime are probably just as skewed.
Wow that got heavy quick. Stopping before it gets heavier. Happy Fun Friday!
