cgmpowers said:
I remember it being released at CompUSA at something like MIDNIGHT. The local news station had a camera showing people standing at the door, then rushing past (nearly running over) sales people and one salesperson screaming "Its just an operating system, SLOW DOWN!!!"...
I got a huge chuckle out of it...sort of like those who stand in line to see Star Wars...geez, the movie sucked...just wait a few days, it'll be on DVD.
Actually, there was a lot more to it than that.
For instance... the night Windows 95 came out, you could get an 8mb SIMM for $95. At the time, they were going for closer to $200.
When Windows 98 came out, they were selling 17" CRT's for $98 (which were going for well over $200 at the time) and new PC's for $198 (remember, this is well before the days of Dell's $299 system du jour).
When ME came out, they had a live band, free drinks, and lots of other free crap (I think I still have a Swatch-like Windows ME watch around here somewhere) as well as the usual sprinking of ultra-cheap sales.
Though, the XP launch was surprisingly spartan by comparison.
Anyway... I think most of the people who were there at (or before) midnight were there for the sales more than the new version of Windows. At the launches before XP, a lot of the sales were first-come-first-served. If you were one of the first three people to the back of the store, you got to walk out with an unbelievably cheap computer / monitor / whatever. Stuff so cheap that you'd be stupid
not to buy it even just to sell it for $50 more before you left the parking lot.
Of course, we can go down the "Everything Is A Microsoft Conspiracy" path and wonder if the sales were subsidized by Microsoft to make the Windows launches look much better than they would have if the only thing people would have got by standing in line was a chance to pay full retail pricing on a new version of Windows
😉