this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2026
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[–] affenlehrer@feddit.org 5 points 21 hours ago (4 children)

I was a kid at the time with a pirated copy of W95. I had memorized the W95 license key (wasn't that difficult but I finally forgot it) because I had to reinstall it so often. I think at least once a month.

[–] pHr34kY@lemmy.world 9 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

17195-OEM-0001875-01864

Yeah, I reinstalled that much that I remember it.

[–] dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world 5 points 18 hours ago

I freed up a couple of spare brain cells on that sort of thing back in the day once it was discovered around the schoolyard that Windows 95 (in addition to Office and a couple of other M$ products) would happily accept a CD key of all ones: 111-1111111. I don't think this was applicable to the OEM versions, though. Windows 98 meanwhile would take a key of 12345-12345-12345, etc.

I still have the Windows 2000 MSDN CD key memorized. From XP onwards, the... alternative... activation methods did not require knowing license keys anymore.

One wonders what it was like to be a member of mankind in an era when all you had to memorize was actually useful information.

[–] Quazatron@lemmy.world 3 points 19 hours ago

Me too, at work, on a dozen machines. ALL THIRTY TWO FLOPPY DISKS.

[–] eurodyne@piefed.world 3 points 21 hours ago

Yeah, I’m pretty sure I had a w98 and xp key memorized at one point

[–] frongt@lemmy.zip 3 points 21 hours ago

I'm pretty sure I still have an index card somewhere with an XP key on it. I very nearly had it memorized.