this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2026
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[–] dual_sport_dork@lemmy.world 5 points 21 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.