Photos from Microsoft's Redmond Office in the late 90s (Software Engineer, Carlos Arguelles)

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the_pixel_cat@reddit

I remember being on the Microsoft campus for a few days in the late 90s. I was an engineer/programmer at Intel and developed the engine for the Intel Web Design Effects, and had to integrate the engine into IEv4 (and also wrote a Netscape plugin, my only foray into Java). (Intel Expands Web Developer Product Line). I was a bit jealous of the private offices, having been in cubicle-land.

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Outside-Storage-1523@reddit

Nowadays cubicles are the new private offices. I haven't worked in a cube for quite a few years. It's open office everywhere. And my company just decided to rent 2/3 of the office and keep everyone in the 1/3, not fun any more.

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the_pixel_cat@reddit

When I was there, the cubicles were at least with 6' high walls, and we had 8x9' cubes. I quit in 2007 after almost 14 years to go back to school for a completely different career field. I visited some of my former coworkers probably 2016, the mood had definitely changed even back then, more open plan (the 'cubicles' were just low dividers and freaking tiny).

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Outside-Storage-1523@reddit

Very sad. But that was expected.

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brianplord@reddit (OP)

Very cool!

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KingLim1@reddit

Not sure how it is now, but back in the 90s, almost every dev has his own room. Good times.

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ExternalUserError@reddit

Everything was just more spacious then. At my first job I didn’t get my own office (senior devs did) but my cubicle was the size of a child’s bedroom. It wasn’t unusual then. No one in the whole company shared a cubicle.

The way offices are packed so tightly now makes me understand why Gens Y and Z prefer WFM. I’ve been WFM since 2006 but it wasn’t really something I craved. I actually spent most of it paying to rent an office.

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tooclosetocall82@reddit

I have my own room. Of course it’s my basement and no one ever visits me there lol. I’ve come to the realization I’ll probably never work in the proper office I always assumed I would as a kid.

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Outside-Storage-1523@reddit

That’s like Fox Mulder, so cool!

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brianplord@reddit (OP)

Because, back then, companies spent a little extra money on workers' quality of life.

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vampyire@reddit

I got hired there in 2000 and at the time everyone got their own office, it was a great way to work.. now everyone is jammed in like sardines..

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miku_hatsunase@reddit

Didn't Microsoft famously have a policy that every employee got their own office? I'm guessing that's sadly gone now.

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vampyire@reddit

when I got hired yes that was the promise for full time employees

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miku_hatsunase@reddit

Figures, thanks.

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Outside-Storage-1523@reddit

I think back then MSFT is still developer heavy, until they got a couple of turfs and can sit on them as a landlord. Being a landlord is the dream of pretty much every bean counter out there, including my wife.

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hblok@reddit

Apparently, every dev didn't get a chair, though.

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Outside-Storage-1523@reddit

I'll die on the hill of any company that gives me:

- Low level programming, or native app development,

- Independent office.

Don't care about pay if they can give mt both as long as it's over 90K CAD yearly.

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NotAMotivRep@reddit

Don't care about pay if they can give mt both as long as it's over 90K CAD yearly.

lol I don't care about pay but I still want to make more than double the national household average.

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montyxgh@reddit

is 90,000 CAD per year really more than double the household average in Canada?

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Outside-Storage-1523@reddit

There are different levels of "don't care about pay".

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Thirsty_Fox@reddit

Those Microsoft Ergonomic split keyboards seem to show up in a ton of photos/footage from that era (also in some movies), yet I don't remember knowing anyone who had them. Must have been popular with developers back in the day.

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IdealBlueMan@reddit

Carpal Tunnel Syndrome was a huge topic at the time. I knew a couple of people who got the surgery for it, and they said it helped them a lot.

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Thirsty_Fox@reddit

You'd think it'd be even worse now with phones and laptops. I think the easiest keyboard I have on my hands/wrists (of many) is actually the modern Apple desktop keyboards.

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IdealBlueMan@reddit

I use an el cheapo OEM keyboard and haven’t had any issues. I should mention that the two people I knew who got the surgery were both very heavyset, and I understand that that can be a factor in whether or not a given person is going to have a problem.

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Thirsty_Fox@reddit

I wonder if they were issued by companies like Microsoft to mitigate the risk of future lawsuits for RSI issues. Recently saw them in documentaries on making games like Half Life and LEGO Island in the mid-late-90s.

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IdealBlueMan@reddit

I wouldn't be surprised at all. At a different company, I once had the HR person practically begging me to ask for a footrest and other ergonomic equipment.

That's when I realized that in many cases, the primary role of HR is to reduce the company's risk of being found liable for injury.

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KingLim1@reddit

I still have two of these in some boxes 😊…

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Thirsty_Fox@reddit

Should we all be so lucky!

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Distinct-Question-16@reddit

I had one. It was very comfortable i think they were thr first to bring context menu and start keys

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Thirsty_Fox@reddit

I recently picked up a later variant of it (blue along the top edge with multimedia keys). I like it for the most part but for me the 'B' key is on the wrong side. I'd love split keyboards if the center-most keys were on both sides.

I find them a lot better for writing plain text than doing programming work or hotkeys.

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Ornery-Practice9772@reddit

where's Carlos??

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jrwil@reddit

Put your shoes on dog

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plong42@reddit

Did they ever find Carlos?

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dumashahn@reddit

Where is that damn Carlos at?

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hugh_jorgyn@reddit

at Amazon apparently :) https://carloarg02.medium.com/

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phineas1134@reddit

You don't find Carlos. He finds you.

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Top-Breakfast-8452@reddit

W H E R E I S C A R L O S ?

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aaronsb@reddit

I remember this vibe.

I worked in PSS (Product Support Services) in 1998/99 or so. This was my spot at the Lincoln Plaza campus in Bellevue. I supported Windows NT 4 (Workstation, mostly) and specialized in RRAS, VPN, and Posix subsystem. (Note the Sun Sparc and Macintosh)

https://imgur.com/a/jJw7EA5

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Scoth42@reddit

Also the Linux box. That would have been an interesting sight there at that time, I'm sure.

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BigBagaroo@reddit

I think Microsoft’s first web site was hosted in a Linux or Unix-box below someone’s desk.

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CmdrGrunt@reddit

I remember visiting my cousins in Ontario back in the mid 90s, they were interning at Microsoft Canada, and this 13 year old kid got a tour of the campus. I remember getting a tour of a tech room with racks of odds and ends PCs. There was an inconspicuous machine the tech said was running Microsoft Canada’s web site, and I thought that was pretty cool. The screen looked like windows nt 3.5.1 which means it must have been IIS 1.0. A release candidate of NT4 was running on another box nearby. I wish I could find some screenshots of the IIS interface from 1.0.

Fun times.

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KingLim1@reddit

The internal Microsoft Mail system was on Xenix when I joined in 1995. Exchange came only later on NT and I found out what it meant to dogfood..

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AnonymooseRedditor@reddit

Oh boy so were you there for bedlam lol

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aaronsb@reddit

Building 16 and Office ship parties were something.

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AnonymooseRedditor@reddit

I've heard so many stories from some of the old guard...

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Scoth42@reddit

I'm a little rusty on it but my recollection was that HoTMaiL was running on BSD when they bought it in 1997 and it took the years (into the early 2000s?) to finally fully get it migrated to Windows Servers. I remember some scuttlebutt about outages and issues being caused by failed attempts to migrate parts of it, though I have no idea how accurate it was. It was a bit of a black eye on Slashdot and similar to them for awhile when they were trying to make NT4 and Win2k with IIS into viable servers, especially with the high profile worms and viruses that were plaguing systems in the late 90s through early 2000s.

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BigBagaroo@reddit

I installed NT 3.5 with IIS in a mountain hall data center with two guards. It was filled with mainframes and my little server :-)

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KingLim1@reddit

Hah... You guys are a godsend to us TAMs.. Thank you for your help! ✌️

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AnonymooseRedditor@reddit

are you still a MSFTie?

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KingLim1@reddit

Not anymore, I left in 2012 after 17 years. The TAM role changed soon after. You still plugging on?

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AnonymooseRedditor@reddit

yep! i'm a relative newbie here (5 years) but been playing with computers and such since I was a kid.

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KingLim1@reddit

Great! We all need to be a bit passionate about computers to work there. Can you talk to Satya and tell him to keep Windows 12 off subscription please?? 🤣

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MechanicalTurkish@reddit

Windows, Solaris, Linux, Mac OS, and LEGOs on one desk. Living the dream.

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JasonMckin@reddit

One of the things that is rarely discussed in the software industry is how most companies are built out of the employees of a series of past companies. And MSFT employees went on to power many other successful companies later on. But I'm not sure how strongly you can say MSFT was influenced by other companies before it. Did it really import DEC/Sun/SGI/Xerox culture? Maybe it did in small part at SVC in the Bay Area and NERD in Boston.

But it feels in large part that Microsoft Bellevue invented and pioneered a lot of the culture and process of how software was constructed and merchandised. Particularly at a very unique time when PCs grew from being nerd machines to everyday desktops and x86 grew from the desktop to the enterprise server/data center environment.

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smpstech@reddit

NT was mostly the brain child of Dave Cutler and his team who were all poached (one could argue) from DEC. Microsoft (and Apple, among others) gobbled up many people from PARC when everyone was moving towards GUI development.

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IdealBlueMan@reddit

Notably Charles “The Hungarian” Simonyi, who gave the world Hungarian Notation.

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JasonMckin@reddit

Yes, I acknowledged SVC and NERD were largely built out of other companies in Silicon Valley and Boston and specific expertise was poached.

That's different than what happened in the 2000s. I worked at companies that literally ran Microsoft style code reviews, program management, RTM processes, etc, right out of the Microsoft playbook.

Microsoft might have imported some humans and teams, but it exported an entire playbook for large-scale software development and distribution. Entire companies were started by "#include microsoft.h"

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KingLim1@reddit

Microsoft Solution Framework. 😊

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Anonymous5791@reddit

HR would round up the ex-DEC folks periodically into the mid-00’s still for reunions where they were still looking for folks who might know folks to hire. I was not ex-DEC but my manager was, and he would get pulled in to those “reunions” for the referrals.

MS spawned a lot of other companies in town in its heyday. I do miss that era of MS from the pictures. We all had our own offices, growth was incredible, and while the hours were long, it was nice to not have to wake up for on call. When you finally did leave the office, you were done until you came back in. Of course “Flex Time” meant you could work any sixteen hours of the day you wanted to choose.

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KingLim1@reddit

IMHO it’s Redmond, not Bellevue. Bellevue was lovely but the real action was in the Redmond campus.

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Silent_Speaker_7519@reddit

They basically robbed has many programmers from Borland has they could get their clammy hands on

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JasonMckin@reddit

But I don't think the math proves that Microsoft was built out of Borland/Lotus/etc. Microsoft scaled from like 5000 employees to 50000 employees. I'm not sure the industry had enough people to rob from. Microsoft became the core platform that future software companies robbed from.

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saraseitor@reddit

That is a VERY tall tower case or maybe two of them, one on top of the other

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ceramicsaturn@reddit

George Costanza lost some weight.

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Outside-Storage-1523@reddit

Found Carlos!
https://carloarg02.medium.com/

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Distribution-Radiant@reddit

The box of cereal next to the desk and shoes being off is peak programmer.

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KingLim1@reddit

That brings back some memories from my time in the 90s and 2000s. Apparently one dev practically lived in his office until HR found out he is directing all his personal email to his MS office!

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ZjY5MjFk@reddit

We had one guy live in his car in the parking lot for like a month. He got in a spat with his landlord and just decided to live in a car in the parking lot.

We got some email saying that the office landlord that they got word of a "mangy looking hobo squatting in the parking lot" and to call the police if you see them. HR had to awkwardly tell them "oh, that's just one of our senior developers". HR also told the senior dev to stop doing that as he is scaring people.

--

Probably unrelated I'm sure, but at the same time they also update the employee handbook to add a section about "hygiene and basic grooming expectations"

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brianplord@reddit (OP)

You really, REALLY should.