Microsoft Coffee | The Internet's Weirdest Mystery

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On April Fools Day of 1996, a group of Microsoft employees played a practical joke on their hometown of Seattle. They decided to create boxes for a fictitious product called "Microsoft Coffee" and placed them on store shelves all around the city. The incident sparked tons of confusion and even lead to angry reactions from Microsoft and Bill Gates, who placed a ban on any future pranks from the company that did not get approved through them first.
However, no archives or records of this story ever occurring currently exist, outside of a Medium article written by one of the pranksters allegedly involved. But all the evidence that this article provides seems to show that this may be much more than just some silly internet hoax. What is the true and full story to the mysterious tale to Microsoft Coffee?
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[@nationsquid]

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[@SupremeSDB]

Yo, I was thinking about your “Windows: Microsoft’s Biggest Mistake” video, and thought it would be nice to see a video about the Xerox 8010, the first OS with a GUI, I’d really love to see that, and think it would be very interesting.

[@itisliamhfjone22]

squares

[@crockstonyt]

SationNquid

[@AppropriateusernameYOUTUBE]

Nationsquid if you’re ever gonna do another video like this can you please make it about that “impostor” Burger King new story in Pittsburg? It’s very obscure and I’m not even sure if it’s real or if it was just a weird hoax thing. This was also around 2014 and only one news station covered it.

[@andrive]

Huh

[@AuntieClimactic]

Bill Gates is sitting on your couch drinking MS Coffee as he watches this.

[@knoxduder]

This wins at KZbin comments for the month!

[@dertythegrower]

The m$ coffee topic is real... pro tips, remove one E.. he didnt research this well, heh. iykyk

[@hyperthetical]

And hes watching it from his UFO as well

[@_DreamzGaming]

😂

[@BaldiReycaster]

1kth LIKE

[@beejls]

It's a possibility that it was a prank by the news anchors themselves. That's why it's not a nationwide thing, with no national notice. An April's Fool's joke by the anchors in one small market.

[@TokyoXtreme]

Seattle is not really a small market, and KOMO TV-4 certainly has the resources to pull off a prank like this - I'm 99% sure the channel themselves put the video together, which explains why the story isn't in any newspapers. Messaging the news anchors would easily settle the "mystery".

[@dertythegrower]

It is a digital red herring.

[@vadnegru]

​@@TokyoXtreme What q contrast to now, when people write a whole article, based on yt video

[@RogueError617]

That's what I am thinking as well. It could even be an advertisement for the product disguised as a news segment that was just not released to the public since Microsoft sent the legal team after them. If the identity of this news anchor is known, then couldn't he just be contacted for information?

[@RogueError617]

@@TokyoXtreme right. It's likely nothing more than an unreleased paid advertisement. I think this just comes down to a product launch fail that was stopped by Microsoft and the people who were trying to launch this product are now trying to create some sort of mystery about it.

[@kris_0520]

If a pot of coffee was brewed at a Microsoft campus, would that make it Microsoft Coffee?

[@raghavthakur1760]

Microstrong coffee

[@ClareHehe]

microdose estrogen

[@CamelCasee]

They have cafe's called megabites

[@steveOCalley]

Every cup, wait 10 minutes for download.

[@jimmlmao]

Microsoft coffee is c#

[@Someguyhere111]

Well I think it's clear what happened: aliens came and took all the copies of Microsoft Coffee, probed everyone's butts, then erased all our memories of both events.

[@isaiaharmstrong1799]

Oh I remember the butt stuff

[@SamWicker-su7rp]

That must be what happened to all the records of the 'global mud flood'.

[@thatweirdphoneguystickman5596]

"What if this April fools prank was never real, but was just an April fools prank itself? Bazinga." - what I wished Nation Squid said.

[@glass6582]

bazinga ò_Ō

[@tzarg]

Azingba

[@vaiovm]

Bazinga!

[@NickShvelidze]

Eww

[@xFluing]

bosnia herzegovina

[@horeemeeyah]

getting your couch stolen is crazy

[@SpiralshapeDev]

ong

[@officialgoldenbros]

he stole it

[@davinp]

@@officialgoldenbros his brother stole it as a prank

[@nationsquid]

Wanted to make it clear that this was just a joke. I'm just moving. Thanks for watching! :)

[@horeemeeyah]

keep up the work man i love your videos@@nationsquid

[@wallyhackenslacker]

This strikes me as someone trying to create a Polybius-like myth centered on Microsoft, but with a disappointing lack of MiB involvement.

[@eugiblisscast]

I was thinking the same thing 🤣

[@mrJety89]

Just email that news anchor. Email both of them.

[@ArsonRaboot]

A good lead, but in all fairness, it wouldn't be unreasonable for them to have forgotten the event and coverage. Could you name what you did at your job 25 years ago? Although, it's also likely that the news station has a copy of the segment. Maybe asking them is worth a shot?

[@Thiesi]

​@@ArsonRabootTrue, but it might still be worth a try. Besides, if they were in on the prank they would almost certainly remember it to this day - unless, of course, they regularly did stuff like that.

[@cameroncole06]

Good idea.

[@XxdipstcklovrxX]

@@ArsonRaboottbh i think even showing them the youtube clip itself would be enough to either say "yeah that was me" or "no i dont remember doing that". i really hope we get an answer to this soon!!

[@Daniel15au]

Might have better luck emailing the station... They might have archival footage.

[@visionplusdrive]

I was around back then, I’m about to be 34 this year, so I was the ripe age for this era of the World Wide Web, and I can confirm I remember Microsoft Coffee. At the very least I do remember that box art on the internet. It’s engrained in my mind like much of my childhood spent exploring the internet in its infancy

[@jojomations2596]

Maybe the real Microsoft Coffee was the friends we made along the way

[@heluv.robert]

💀

[@HeyItIsMichal]

You're right...

[@SamsonCramer]

That is so corny

[@spingleboygle]

“coach was right, guys, we just had to believe in Microsoft Coffee!”

[@theawesometeg219]

Maybe the real jojomations2596 was the friends we made along the way

[@RetroPC]

I am totally putting this image of Microsoft Coffee on a mug, so I can have a Microsoft Coffee mug.

[@BinglesP]

Better yet, make the mug pattern the same as the mug on the logo, same weird reverse-gradient shade line and everything

[@wolfieamel]

on a random chances that its actually a thing, Microsoft Coffee could be something that keeps the computer awake ignoring the power management system. with that said we actually have Microsoft Coffee in PowerToys, its used to be called Caffeinate, but its now called "PowerToys Awake", and it keeps your screen awaken

[@dertythegrower]

It is actually a thing. He missed the research as its buried by this red herring news clip

[@seancdaug]

That's a very reasonable idea for a piece of software, certainly, but not the kind of thing that I'd expect to see sold as a standalone retail product in its own box, even in the '90s. As something packaged in one of Microsoft's Plus! packs for Windows, on the other hand, it would make perfect sense (which is where the whole "PowerToys" concept originated in the first place, wasn't it?).

[@macdaniel6029]

Today MS is completely woke.

[@arandomsupra]

Theres actually Microsoft software called COFEE which is used by police to extract evidence from windows PCs

[@SurmenianSoldier]

@@macdaniel6029 damn liberals...

[@Littlefighter1911]

11:00 It's very easy to find out. Ask the broadcasting service. Usually they keep footage around for a few decades. And if not some summary.

[@mskinkaju]

Or try to contact the news anchors and see if they remember.

[@robertotoledo107]

It happened to us, as recently as 2018: I went to a public party with a couple of friends, and at some point, we headed to the store to get more alcohol, when a large amount of cops arrived to the area, and we decided to leave and headed to my house. That was a Friday, on Monday, the incident was on the newspaper, we even mocked the headline of "more than 200 young people drinking alcohol on the street" and even shared the link (as it was on the internet), this year I told the story to another friend, but I didn't find the link, and I REALLY spent some time looking for it

[@wolfetteplays8894]

That is because the internet is the prime ground to manufacture a "year zero" type of deal.

[@Darxide23]

This is absolutely a modern hoax and the "VHS tape" gives it away. The constant loss of vertical hold is hiding some of the edits and seams that the creator couldn't. That is _not_ how VHS typically looked and I find it more and more grating that the younger generations actually think that's how things were. The "Analog horror" genre especially is filled with tons of "VHS effect" filters that don't look anything like what real VHS did. You could get that kind of horrible, horrible distortion on a very worn out VCR, but it's not difficult to adjust for that. I've got 30 and 40 year old VHS tapes of family events recorded by my grandparents and a 20 year old VCR and the picture is perfectly fine. No rolling, no "scratchy" lines across the image, no blurring at the top and bottom, no distorted audio. It doesn't look as great on a modern LED screen, though. Just a bit fuzzy, but that's not the fault of the tape or the VCR. tl;dr: VHS doesn't look like this unless it's played back on an extremely worn out VCR or with a heavily abused tape that has been physically damaged.

[@laceyrainbolt5432]

lmao thank you! there are plenty of real vhs rips on yt and if the tapes were stored properly they look great. way better than low-res digital video. i think adding heavy distortion of any kind to a video can make it scary, so i think that’s why it’s so exaggerated, but it’s definitely twisting the perception of people who didn’t grow up with the technology. it’s like how people in the vaporwave community would purposefully create warped and worn out cassette tapes for added nostalgia. i have tapes that are around 50 years old and they sound just fine!

[@bananawitchcraft]

Yeah tbh that is a good point

[@KristopherBel]

I mainly agree although I will suggest some version had vertical tracking and it could be way off, a simple thing to fix if you know what it is and how but for an inexperienced vcr user I could totally see them putting a tape into a vcr that hasn't been used in 20 years and getting those lines because the v-tracking has shifted, then not knowing it's an easy fix, and because they think that's what vhd looks like they just go ahead and record that.

[@JZB-2022]

This is what is referred to as "Professional Gaslighting"

[@eadweard.]

"Gaslighting" is a term like "ironic" and "iconic": everyone's determined to use it, but no one seems to know what it means.

[@classicnosh]

Gaslighting involves consistently misleading someone to the extent that they start doubting their own perception of reality. It's important to note that this situation differs because, despite Microsoft's past reputation for being unreliable, they haven't explicitly acknowledged the existence of the issue.

[@eadweard.]

@@classicnosh What issue?

[@classicnosh]

@@eadweard. I meant to write software, sorry

[@TitaniumTurbine]

@@eadweard. Yep, and no one truly knows what gaslighting is until they’re dating someone who makes it an instrumental part of their personality.

[@TracksWithDax]

Why do I feel like the news station was the one doing the prank, and some guy is just riding the coattails of an actual video clip by claiming the store prank even happened

[@Gameboygenius]

I asked Dave Plummer from Dave's Garage and got this simple response back within minutes. Pretty damning for the story. I was there in ’96 and sure never heard of it then! And you’d think it’d be the kind of thing you’d hear about :-) Cheers, Dave

[@confusedkemono]

welp if davepl says that then it's really some elaborate prank

[@acex222]

He's an asshole, so I wouldn't be surprised if nobody told him.

[@donoteatmikezila]

Case closed.

[@FirecrackerTNT]

It is entirely possible this news story simply didn’t survive to the internet. I can share a related story from my dad- he used to live in this (at the time) little town in Alberta, and apparently while walking to school, he and his friends smelled fire. That fire was related to a gruesome murder-suicide of a teacher and her husband. We both looked for news articles, an obituary, anything- but nothing popped up. I even asked my mom, and she says she remembered seeing it on the news. It was everywhere, everyone in that town knew. But we cannot find it online anywhere My dad suspects it could be found only in physical public records, since it happened so long ago.

[@jeffreyseay7707]

The worst April Fool's prank I ever went through actually happened to A LOT of people IN MY ENTIRE TOWN. Last time April 1 fell on a Friday, the local ATM was modified so as to keep ANY debit card put into it regardless, and anyone who fell for it had to either wait for it to be returned through the mail or, if for some reason they couldn't afford to wait, ask for a new one. The latter would require a small fee. But with my low income, it would NOT be a drop in the bucket for yours truly. So by putting a new twist on the law against stealing (by reinterpreting the word so as to also mean "cause to lose"), I called the bank and basically stuck up for everyone affected. Because of yours truly, NO ONE had to pay the fee that year, though we all still had to wait for Saturday to take out our money AND write a check for it, which, sadly, couldn't be avoided. I would still like to know what kind of BIFF would do something like that. I hope they don't even have a job right now and do also not have a disability, as they certainly deserve neither

[@HungerGamesFan00]

biff?

[@jeffreyseay7707]

@@HungerGamesFan00 Yes, as you likely thought, I WAS referring to Biff Tannen of Back To The Future. THAT IS the kind of prank he would pull, though I should admit I was only scratching the surface according to the trilogy

[@HungerGamesFan00]

@@jeffreyseay7707 oh lmao i thought it was an acronym

[@MrDannyDetail]

Wouldn't the new card be sent out through the same mail service and at the same timescale? Also here in the UK you can lose and block your card and request a new card as many times as you're unlucky enough to need to and to the best of my knowledge they never charge a fee for the new one.

[@jeffreyseay7707]

@@MrDannyDetail This is the USA and those things cost money just as they would where you live. Everything costs money everywhere. And in this case, it happened en masse. Therefore, I knew I had to be the town hero and have them force the town Tannen to pay the entire collective bill

[@skeletino420]

about the ufo story. you should go to the library in that area and check the newspaper archives, typically they have em on microfilm and they're well archived. the internet is amazing for research but sometimes you'll have to look elsewhere and dig a bit deeper, and the local library is an insanely good place to start.

[@tristanbrooks4755]

"Clippy was annoying" How dare you sir.

[@PiraNov]

My family had a PC-store back in the mid to late 90's. When I saw that icon on the thumbnail of this video it felt LEGIT nostalgic and I was looking forward to see what "that software" I barely remember was all about, just to hear it might not even have existed. But it feels eerily familiar to me. However, it is likely because it has the perfect elements that is reminiscent of things that actually existed back then.

[@sjbeard2941]

Me too, I was sure I had seen that box or icon at some point in the mid-90s!

[@redymedy]

I was so worried this video would be a joke I had to look it up lmao. I love these videos so I'm glad this isn't just misinfo.

[@Sky-bx9mn]

...actually, a lot of what's in this video is just completely wrong about even such basic things as "what technology existed in 2021".

[@SourCandy2134]

Nationsquid wearing a Green Day shirt gives me an unhealthy amount of serotonin.

[@RBLXProd]

I am not joking, a classmate of mine owns a pad paper called Microsoft/Windows Paper. It's so absurd I love it

[@Sunyup804]

in 1996 widescreen TV's were not mainstream. Broadcasts were still done in 4:3 format.

[@macdaniel6029]

Not only not mainstream, they didn't exist at all. Maybe a few prototypes.

[@MRNGrandpere]

The video looks stretched though, so this is probably a moot point

[@MrDannyDetail]

@@macdaniel6029 Flat screens didn't exist then, but there were extremely heavy widescreen cathode ray tube televisions even in the 90s even in the UK, so they must presumably also have existed in the US too.

[@Matt-oq4jq]

@@macdaniel6029they absolutely existed lmao

[@inny74]

@@Matt-oq4jq While flat-screen televisions did exist, you would likely barely ever see them at the time, as they werent financially viable to consumers (as in: very fucking expensive) and were still very early in their infancy. Flat-screen televisions wouldnt catch the mainstream consumer's attention in the US until the digital television transition began in 2009. The first US station to utilize 16:9 aspect ratio, and in turn, Digital Television, was WRAL-TV, a TV station in Raleigh, NC in July 23, 1996, past the date where this supposed April Fools would have taken place. And they were no strangers being pioneers of advanced technology, even back then. And even then, it took the rest of the stations a bit to catch up. EDIT: after looking closely, the video also does not look like a stretched 4:3, its not stretched enough to scale in-line with what widescreen TVs would be available back in the day. It is likely faked

[@gabe_s_videos]

The possibility that the story of the Microsoft Coffee prank was, itself, a prank makes me think the theory that Andy Kaufman didn't fake his own death but rather FAKED faking his own death (ie, spent the last few months of his life tricking people into thinking he was faking his death before actually dying).

[@thepokeball]

Isnt Microsoft COFFEE also the name of the tool they developed for law enforcement agencies? I feel like I'm going crazy here not seeing anyone else mention this.

[@dertythegrower]

Smartest person here.

[@SureshotCyclonus]

Yes, Microsoft COFEE (Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor).

[@drewbabe]

came to the comments to say the same. i remember when people on the internet caught wind of the existence of that software. I remember that you had to install it on a USB stick, and then it either did diagnostics or cracking or both. I specifically remember people saying "never stick a USB drive you don't own into your computer, in case it has something like this on it" and also "even if your computer is off, don't ever leave it unattended, or else a hacker could plug this in, turn your computer on, and they basically own your computer now. I don't even know entirely what it did, I just know that it was scary stuff and that only three-letter agencies were legally allowed to have it. I'm sure similar stuff exists for macOS and Linux, but given Microsoft's history of gladly adding backdoors to their OS for the NSA to exploit, it definitely added to the list of reasons I eventually stopped using Windows for personal computers...

[@28russ]

I just saw it mentioned with one comment between yours and it. 😂

[@_..-.._..-.._]

Microsoft Office looks like Microsoft Coffee while speaking. The camera zooms in on the box which is a red flag, and the VHS artifacts are EXTREME, like ridiculous levels of error.

[@Eliasdbr]

I was thinking the same thing, there are too many VHS artifacts. That vertical sync artifact looks too "on the nose" Nevertheless, it's an almost perfect job

[@Plaprad]

I can vouch for a few things. I was in high school in the late 90's, and that period was WILD. "Dude, you got a Dell" is forever seared into my brain against my wishes. So I can see something like this happening. Also, stuff disappears over time. I can remember many things from the past that are just gone. I've lost count of how many times someone will bring something from the time up and I'll remember a forum thread about it, which no longer exists. But I'll be honest. Something about that news report seems "off". It just looks like something someone made today to look like it was from the 90's. Just for an example that I just thought of. There are lots of old videos from The Weather Channel on KZbin. As well as a bunch of modern recreations of them. Look at a modern one and then one of the originals. 90's tech and graphics just had a different feel to them that most wouldn't see unless they grew up with it. But if it is a fake video, it's a well done fake.

[@ActuallyHoudini]

hm. so its aliens. aliens made the coffee.

[@s1nenomine677]

An explanation could be made from how current Google is outright worthless when it comes to finding slightly obscure information. The net has grown too much and left Google behind, which is now only able to check small, mainstream parts of it. There likely are forums, blogs or news articles that are currently online that discuss Coffee or that UFO sighting, but you don't have a way to find them.

[@professorhaystacks6606]

Yeah but they're the default on most devices so they have near-monopoly power on that. That's only slightly related it's just something that bugs me.

[@MCKejml]

Couldn't this be fixed by using another search engine?

[@DarkGob]

The problem isn't that the internet has "grown too much and left Google behind", the problem is that Google is optimized around SEO and adtech. Google has left *us* behind.

[@y1ttt]

in the 90s i was like 7 and an aunt suddenly stormed the house asking for me, turns out a boy named just like me, same age and city, died on a hunting accident by his brother, named like mine and same age, who also enjoys hunting, the news paper my aunt gave me was lost over the past 20+ years, all the family remembers, but it doesn't exist on the archives nor the internet, lost forever such a tragic and weird incident

[@MakaylaHolland]

I had the same thing happen to me when I was a kid around 2009-2010. There was a bright light and sound of a crash, it woke me and my family up out our sleep. Literally had us and neighbors go outside their house to see where it came from. We honestly thought it was a plane at first but the sounds and lights were so oddly different it couldn’t have been, nothing was found. It was never reported in the news and this happened in San Diego, California. Me and my family still talk about it to this day.

[@dertythegrower]

Obvious.. that is a military area.

[@xlicer]

Give that news anchor vid to captain dissillusion and he will debunk it in 2 mins

[@xnetpc]

I'm surprised you didn't mention Microsoft Cofee (Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor), the forensic software Microsoft released at no cost to law enforcement agencies on October 13, 2009

[@flimflam384]

I swear I remember this being a crappy wizard-driven Java Applet IDE/creator for Windows 95/NT 4.0 that made applets that only worked in Internet Explorer and were broken in Netscape. I'm probably thinking of something else, but at the time I was working at a mom-and-pop PC build/repair/resale store in the PNW at the time, and this rings a bell...

[@joshallen128]

Activex

[@joshallen128]

Javabeans

[@joshallen128]

Maybe it's visual j plus plus

[@wood4sheep]

This. I want to say M$ bought the wysiwyg ide just after I rolled out a site with it. It was competitive with early flash. The predecessor name escapes me unfortunately but the prior name was also Java-ish.

[@hwertz10]

So I was curious until I saw the clip from the video, then went to the link and played it. That does not look like VHS playback. I'm 44 so I watched a lot of VHS stuff back in the day (both prerecorded, and tapes we'd reuse maybe dozens of times essentially for DVR-like use, record stuff to tape and watch it later.) I also transferred some ~20 year old tapes that were recorded on camcorder last year. Tapes don't roll like that, I mean when they do the picture is also snowy as hell, you don't get a rolling-but-clear picture then a slight burst of snow. Also (although this is not definitive), although the WEB was in it's infancy, there was an active Internet going back to the 1980s. Usenet was in very active use back then, and is fully archived. Google group's Usenet search function shows no mentions of Microsoft Coffee either.

[@nickwallette6201]

I'm skeptical of the "VHS artifacts".

[@FriedAudio]

Ditto. I don't recall ever seeing "artifacts" like that on a VHS tape. Those look more like vertical-hold issues (roll & flutter) on an old CRT television. 🤔🤔🤔

[@theprinceofinadequatelighting]

@@FriedAudio Distortions and vertical sync issues can happen with damaged vhs tape. Back in the 90s my brother once got his hands on a p*rno tape and tried to switch out the actual physical tape with some other cartridge (cassette?) so that our parents wouldn't find out but when he put it in the vcr there was all sorts of color distortion, audio weirdness, and vertical syncing issues. Of course, I was a kid and was just trying to get a glimpse past the distortions because booba but I remember fairly clearly... those were some formative distortions, I tell you what.

[@RobertPucovsky]

​@@FriedAudioyep that's what I'm thinking as well. Maybe if the tape got remastered it could look much better because the information is still there.

[@IlIBonesIlI]

I've seen a _lot_ of VHS artifacting in my time, especially from longplays and superlongplay tapes. This is plausible, but doesn't look quite right to my eye. Of course, standards and framerates were different in the US, perhaps 60FPS makes a tape flicker a little differently

[@Thiesi]

Well, someone from the area can probably tell whether the _4_ logo resembles any station ident of the time in the area. Besides, don't American station call signs always start with either a _K_ or a _W_ so that just a _4_ would not be what any local TV station would even be _allowed_ to be called? Given that Seattle is at least nowadays west of the Mississippi, local station call signs would have to start with a _K._ Now I don't live in the U.S., but would a station called something like _KIV-TV_ have an ident consisting of just the number _4_ like in the clip?

[@safebox36]

I think the best April Fool's joke is when Google announced GMail at the same URL that was previously Garfield Mail. Because GMail continues to be a joke to this day.

[@s0men00bb]

"Microsoft Coffee" can be found on VS98 and Win 98 and so on. It was Microsoft version of Java , and was also in Internet Explorer v4.0 , earliest I think , but to enable that plugin , you often needed to restart the computer which was nightmarish at the time as they took forever to restart. You can also find in old tech news mention of Windows 96 , but IRL it is Win 98 or Win 95 OSR2 (OSR2 was Service Pack before they called them like that) , as releasing a new version a year after Win 95 was dropped. Another descrepancy is very physical and digital today and that is Office 97 , and since Win version and Office version always matched , this however does not. Win 98 wasn't ready when Office 97 was released.

[@keyesrm]

The news clip looks real. I grew up and live in Seattle, and I recognize that news anchor from my childhood. He did indeed work for KOMO, channel 4.

[@Icecreamqueenthe15th]

"it's just a prank bro" The prank:

[@UltimatePerfection]

Back in those days, Microsoft used to add "express" to the free versions of their commercial software (e.g. Outlook Express, FrontPage Express). I think I will wait for one of those, Microsoft Coffee Express.

[@MusicFanatical1]

They could've called it Microsoft Espresso

[@_Lassic_]

Dude your videos on this exact sort of random stuff are so awesome. I hope you can continue to upload more often with the same great quality.

[@ar_xiv]

I can see this being a very minor but real thing because the public probably had close to zero interaction with the product before it was pulled, with only a handful of store employees handling the boxes

[@darkg1zmo]

I was genuinely expecting this to end with you being the person who created the site as an April Fools prank.

[@technicolourmyles]

It's not impossible. Especially since he hasn't made much effort to really investigate this, and the whole video just serves to promote this story even further with the notion that we can't know if it's real or not.

[@theprinceofinadequatelighting]

The UFO took the couch.

[@peterwilliamson1]

Yes, I can vouch that this Microsoft Coffee was real and it did happen. I was an accountant with a small accountancy film (Tate & Oellrich Inc) in Issaquah. I remember my old keyboard had issues and I visited that egghead store to find a replacement only to see a copy of that Microsoft Coffee. I felt something was really off with the box as the design and colour feels 'off' as if it is printed with a printer... I can't remember exactly as it was so long ago but I did remember the back of the box was full of texts and I remember it is supposed to be a 'programming' software made for Windows 95. It doesn't feel like a real product and since I'm not into programming I just put the item back. I did, however, remember a bespectacled nerdy guy trying to get a copy of it and was arguing with the cashier insisting he needs it badly. He started throwing tantrum like a child and I just shook my head and left with my purchased keyboard replacement.

[@Herimaka]

And then everyone clapped.

[@LiEnby]

Idk that was kinda beleivable until someone else also tried to purchase it at the same time you were there thats a bit much

[@Landon783]

MS Coffee sounds like remnant of the internet cafe days when people would order a coffee to sit down and try this new information super highway. Very strange. Could it possibly be an obscure Mandela Effect? I didn't think about it until you compared it to your childhood memory that your siblings confirm. There are probably thousands of odd effects like this, and the less popular ones are very hard to track down.

[@kriscynical]

What was Coffee supposed to _do,_ exactly?

[@futtt_buckerson]

I thought the same. By the looks of it, Java (programming language) was only a year old. I presume it was popular enough by then. And this was Microsoft’s attempt to aggressively bring out something similar to compete with ‘Java’. Which, given Microsoft’s track record in those days, was probably believable 😂

[@toajames1]

@@futtt_buckerson They did, it's called C#.

[@TheRenegade...]

@@futtt_buckersonThe funny thing is that Microsoft Java exists. It's called C#

[@wallyhackenslacker]

@@futtt_buckerson Microsoft for real put out not one but two Java competitors, J++ and J#, of which J++ in particular was a blatant part of MS's embrace, extend, extinguish practice at the time.

[@seancdaug]

In addition to J++ (which was supposed to be an implementation of Java rather than a competitor, but it never passed Sun's compliance tests), ActiveX was often talked about as a Java competitor. It really wasn't much like Java at all, but a lot of early publicity around Java involved the ability to embed Java applets into webpages, and ActiveX was kinda sorta doing the same thing, if you squinted, I guess.

[@glubtier]

If it was in any local Seattle news papers, I find it VERY hard to believe that Seattle Public Library has no records whatsoever. That is not a tiny library.

[@helmaschine1885]

Yeah, his entire dismissal that it's simply news "gone from the internet" holds no water. News articles from any decade can be found digitised all the time. An April fools jokes tend to be stand out things that news channels have to tell media about afterwards so people don't keep being fooled

[@cooltaylor1015]

Indeed, the timestamped news broadcast should be archived somewhere as well. May be difficult to find viewable copies though. It's simply a matter of narrowing down relevant possible air dates, and checking the timestamped time for that story.

[@technicolourmyles]

Yeah, it's BS. Everything provided originates from a single source, no names were revealed, they made an article, a website, a Twitter account and a KZbin channel JUST for this "story". I'll wait for the rabbit hole KZbinrs to get on this. They would actually contact the news station and anchors to get to the bottom of this. I kinda wish you had done that instead of just regurgitating the Medium article.

[@RobertPucovsky]

Now I'm interested in that UFO story that you mentioned. Time to get in touch with the local news paper?

[@tbk2010]

Fairly certain the video is fake. You don't need AI to do that. As a matter of fact, AI would currently only really help with the voice cloning. I think it's a clever combination of audio / video splicing from a similar story and some compositing and/or newly filmed material. The fact that it's such bad quality is just too convenient. I have VHS from the 80s that still play just fine. Tapes only look like that if you abuse them horribly, use a broken VCR, mess up the original recording, or copy them over and over.

[@Queefy]

Microsoft Hot Coffee

[@RobertPucovsky]

It was Rockstar all along

[@Psikeomega]

I find it jarring and awkward sometimes that stuff just disappears of the Internet and people just dont remember anything about it. Ive been trying to dig up an old webcomic thaf stopped running over 10 years ago and all the internet archives apparently never crawled the site, and apparently nobody else onthe web remembers it either. One other person Ive met actually remembers reading it.

[@MisterTalkingMachine]

what webcomic was it?

[@Psikeomega]

@@MisterTalkingMachine dungeons and dorks webcomics.

[@MrMudbill]

Can't we just contact those reporters in the video? Check what they have to say?

[@TokyoXtreme]

That would take a layer of research one level above Googling.

[@xxplosiv88]

Why don't you try to get in touch with those two news reporters (if they're still kicking)?

[@googlehomemini2059]

And the two networks that are named specifically to see if they have any archival footage

[@KingNikolai]

I've lived in WA my whole life and I'm pretty familiar with this station. Keith Eldridge retired in 2022, though I don't recognize the female anchor.

[@googlehomemini2059]

@@KingNikolaishould ring them :)

[@AveryAnarchy]

I am not understanding...you find this mystery, and the only piece of evidence of a video, you find the news guy from the video, and just go "we'll never know" ...?? this guy would know! ask him??

[@runnersdialzero1244]

He might, but I'm sure the dude did hundreds of stories in his time and details can become fuzzy.

[@realitierney]

You’re a brave man having a Nickelodeon blimp on your desk haha😂😳 good video!

[@moogyboy6]

The screen rolling effect on the newscast footage is a dead giveaway that it's a fake. The tip off is that it's being played on a modern flat screen LCD TV. What the creator of the video (and possibly you, Nation Squid, forgive me if I'm wrong) doesn't get is that screen rolling is not a VHS videotape artifact per se but an analog CRT TV artifact. The rolling is not recorded on the tape itself, it originates *in the TV* as a response to a poor video signal coming from the tape (a CRT is based on an electron beam sweeping across the screen in a precisely synchronized pattern; rolling happens when the electron beam and the video signal fall out of sync). Modern LCD tvs work in a completely different way than old school CRT sets, and are not susceptible to this sort of video glitch. Also there's way too much of the effect applied to be realistic, and for someone who grew up intimately with VHS and analog TV (I'm 50) something about it just overall doesn't seem quite right. Ironically, what was probably a technologically sophisticated attempt to mimic a vintage broadcast using software is foiled by a failure to understand how an antiquated, relatively simple technology worked. They tried a little too hard, but t's still a good try.

[@flashcardz3150]

Was waiting for the final twist where you reveal that you made all of it up at the end of the video, but it never happened.

[@TeleviseGuy]

When Google used to do April Fools, I was excited every year to see what prank they would pull off. After the pandemic started in 2020, Google completely stopped doing April Fool, and so did other tech companies. And that's kinda sad but understandable.

[@81milliontotallylegitimate10]

why is that understandable?

[@TokyoXtreme]

Because of an unrelated event, jokes aren't allowed to exist? Humor must be banned?

[@HungerGamesFan00]

April 1 being like 2 weeks after the pandemic/lockdowns really hit in the us, and people not really being collectively 'ready' for it quite yet. Not to mention, iirc April 1 was easter

[@ps5hasnogames55]

@@TokyoXtremewelcome to the woke generation where even humour is harmful

[@TokyoXtreme]

@@ps5hasnogames55 Need a license for lulz.

[@BradWest96]

Has anyone mentioned the software COFEE (Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor) developed by Microsoft? There is an actual Microsoft COFEE, it's just a software used for forensics to gather evidence from computers.

[@FSAPOJake]

About that news clip, it's not TOO hard to fake that stuff. Remember the old FHRITP videos that went viral a decade ago?

[@helmaschine1885]

wtf is fhritp? are people supposed to know what you're talking about?? People can barely spell.

[@FSAPOJake]

@@helmaschine1885 Literally just type it into the KZbin search bar. Not that hard.

[@devicemodder]

iirc, there's a forensics toolkit made by microsoft called microsoft cofee... or Microsoft Computer Online Forensic Evidence Extractor (COFEE)

[@InaSilentWay]

my theory is that Microsoft themselves are behind this hoax to coverup the forensics app that they don’t want people searching - it makes perfect sense and would explain the high quality of the editing in the video

[@thepokeball]

Do you think they reused the name)

[@InaSilentWay]

@@thepokeball I think it was intentional and Microsoft is behind this hoax lol

[@MrMegaManFan]

If you want to hear about a different kind of “Microsoft Coffee” be sure to check out Dave’s Garage.

[@rednival]

I mean, you have to admit, if you were someone trying to break into the film industry, this is genius. You have a video you can show studios and a whole lot of people vouching for how good the effects are. And it’s all about a fairly boring prank that never happened, so you’re not going to set off red flags.

[@DENMAR411]

Maybe we're using different versions of Google but I'm able to find references with images to Microsoft Coffee back to the early 2000s.

[@technicolourmyles]

What are you searching? I searched for «"Microsoft coffee" before:2005-01-01» and there are no results.

[@slowdownex]

Honestly, if you want a website bad enough to be concerned about it, but not bad enough that you’re willing to put any effort in, then you probably just don’t need one… im js 😂

[@lexibigcheese]

microsoft java, also known as C# (they are INCREDIBLY similar.)

[@wallyhackenslacker]

Microsoft had two other for real Java clones meant to displace it: J++ and J#. J++ was so blatant that Sun Microsistems sued Microsoft over it.

[@PicturesqueGames]

Actually funnier than that. Microsoft was developing initial C# as J# series of extensions to java. But after some time they just couldn't wrangle it anymore so they just dropped java altogether and did the microcode part themselves.

[@KarmicXRestrictions]

The news footage is clearly shot and edited in 16:9 due to it being widescreen and the corner logo. If the VHS was really it would be in 4:3 and the "artifacting" would be slower. The distortions are also very conveniently placed. The Microsoft coffee during distortion has gotta be spliced audio you can hear the pause

[@deltasyn7434]

I think this could be solved by contacting the news broadcaster. TBH, it seems like it was a prank. Either by the broadcaster themselves, or MS employees who got them to run the story. That said, if it turns out the news broadcaster was pranked into running the story, that would explain the absence of evidence in web searches. They would have scrubbed it from the web to avoid embarrassment.

[@ktocae]

Dead giveaway is the modern aspect ratio, it does not look like a stretched 4:3

[@LendriMujina]

It's like the internet never bothers to preserve things unless they can potentially be used to harm someone. (If it can, however, you can bet there will always be a laser-clear trail somewhere.)

[@S0m35uy]

In 1995 or 1996, yes I'm old, a friend of my parents' committed a grizzly murder. The crime and his arrest were all over the local news in Vancouver. The Sun and The Province covered his crime. I remember this event vividly. Something like that is so jarring to a child. I have tried to find news coverage of this multiple times over the years and have failed every time. Archiving is simply not as thorough as one would expect.

[@gianpaolostangoni4881]

Am I the only one who saw a black sphere moving on the right side of the screen at 05:38????

[@helmaschine1885]

Terrifying! Flies are so supernatural and scary!

[@gianpaolostangoni4881]

@@helmaschine1885 they are indeed

[@rikkisnow1313]

I’ve been in the news twice by name and recorded for a segment about my health and it’s absolutely nowhere online, I’ve tried to find it. Very Early 2000s

[@IlIBonesIlI]

On the subject of missing software, I remember my stepfather renting out an SNES game from Blockbuster that I have not been able to find since. If I had to compare it to anything, it was like... somewhere between _A Link to the Past_ and _Pocky & Rocky._ All I can remember are vague Chinese mythos vibes, a level select screen, and I think one level was a fight on the back of a gigantic green serpentine Dragon. I have looked high and low, my Stepfather had several friends into gaming so a number of early consoles came through my house, and being about 3-4 years old I don't remember much. I Do remember trying out Cybermorph on Atari Jaguar, and a little of the original Alien Vs Predator long before I knew what a Xenomorph was. That game kept their shilouette in my mind for many years til I saw the actual movie.

[@Chubby_Bub]

There were so many niche, third-party or bootleg games like that at the time. I'm sure it exists but it also sounds near-impossible to find.

[@Sky-bx9mn]

The Legend of the Mystical Ninja?

[@Sky-bx9mn]

The first game has you fight a dragon but doesn't involve riding a dragon I don't think. The second game (Ganbare Goemon 2) wasn't released in English but does have a level where you ride a dragon.

[@JJMcCullough]

What an intriguing mystery! I am partial to the idea that the TV people made it up. But the recording seems strange to me.

[@socalminstrel]

Twist: NationSquid created this whole video just to prank us about his made-up UFO story.

[@97channel]

I have known very noteworthy news items from yesteryear to completely disappear without trace. Surprisingly, it does happen. Without going into too much detail, I remember two events from the late 90's which I just cannot find a single documentation of; one was just the most insanely windy day I've ever known to hit the city I've lived in all my life. By far the strongest storm I've ever witnessed. No record of it. Lists of notable storms and related weather events completely ignore that it ever occurred. And the other thing was a celestial event around 1997 / 98 where, for around a fortnight, you could casually look at the night sky and easily spot at least one shooting star within a few minutes of looking. Again, no trace that this crazy phenomenon ever happened. Regarding Microsoft Coffee, the weird thing is it seemed really familiar when I started watching this video. I kind of vaguely remembered hearing about it in my early days of getting online, late 00's. The name, the logo, the story of the hoax; all felt like it was something I've heard about before. But now I'm questioning if it isn't simply a clever recent hoax of a hoax which imitated various 90's iconography to create a false memory. It's really interesting.

[@taylorwoolston8856]

The article was posted on April 1st 2021. Nuff said.

[@annegrohs6181]

". . . way ahead of the curb . . ." Microsoft skipped the curve-nay!-the whole road, flying right over the curb, through our lawns, and straight into our homes. LOL

[@iamaprofessional]

Why is the VHS recording of a newscast in the 90's in 16:9 aspect ratio?

[@leap123_]

its stretched from 4:3

[@iamaprofessional]

@@leap123_ sure, but i haven't seen a TV yet where it automatically stretches the input to match the TV ratio by default. It has to be selected. So why bother? It's sus.

[@damian9303]

@@iamaprofessionalMost TVs automatically stretch the composite signal so there’s no black borders

[@macdaniel6029]

@@iamaprofessional normal behaviour.

[@iamaprofessional]

@@damian9303 I use VCRs, Laserdisc, and numerous old video game consoles and have for decades and this has never been my experience.

[@healthyminds9279]

Great video!! This taught me a very important lesson. We can't take it for granted that somebody will document an event just because there's a lot of people in the world. Sometimes zero people will do something because we all assume someone else will. A lot of things that seem like somebody should be doing them actually have zero people. Popular MMOs have certain places where nobody ever goes to.

[@alexmipego]

Actually there is one very plausible explanation that says the video is 100% real, but also why there's no mention of it. What if they filmed it as a preview for MS executives to review the advertising strategy for this april fools, but then it got cancelled?

[@cooltaylor1015]

It's timestamped. This was recorded over the air. The live time wouldn't be on an unused preview spot.

[@alexmipego]

@@cooltaylor1015 "It's timestamped." And you can't do that in photoshop?

[@4cannibal]

I kept expecting this video itself to be the april fools prank

[@Kubaak01]

Please do a video about that UFO story...

[@Sky-bx9mn]

At 6:31 so maybe you mention it later but MS Coffee would have sounded even more believable because there was an actual Microsoft CD called MS Wine, which just had a bunch of educational information about wine.

[@realityveil6151]

ask dave from dave's garage.

[@ratsniffer]

Honestly, the name "Microsoft Coffee" makes sense for like a morning news brief automatically made by like Cortana

[@geoffgunn9673]

What was program called that opened the cd draw? I remember it being for using the 'coffee cup colder' on the computer as a joke. Would have been around this time when i first saw it.

[@tristanbrooks4755]

This is a reverse Mandela Effect. We have residue but no memory.

[@joffedy]

Change the title to "Microsoft Coffee: The Program No One Can Find". Trust me. It's a much more effective one than just a weird internet mystery, your thumbnail portrays the topic and it's interesting parts much better than the current title does, but the words in the top left of it are so small your eyes don't immediately lock onto them, which means they should be present somewhere else where you can see them immediately, in this case that would be the title.

[@bestestdev]

First thing I did after watching this was go to Google myself to see if maybe you were pulling a three layer April Fools joke (meaning there is no Microsoft Coffee story). But alas, it’s really (maybe) a thing.

[@TheJillianRussell]

Awesome shirt! My fave band in the world 😁