Hacker News

Sneaking into the auditorium for the Windows 2000 launch rehearsal (devblogs.microsoft.com)

38 pointsby ibobev2 hours ago7 comments

yodon 2 hours ago

Raymond Chen is one of the great treasures of the web.

michalpleban an hour ago

Of course I remember IR file sharing! And contact beaming from Palm devices.

jeffrallen an hour ago

I remember waiting for IR file sharing. It was SLOW.

wayne an hour ago

I mostly remember infrared transfers in the context of beaming contacts between PalmPilots. It was pretty fast for that, and actually, much more reliable than modern AirDrop.

netsharc 24 minutes ago

Huh, now I remember a 90's or early 00's watch that has data, and the way to upload data onto it was by running a special Windows program that would flicker an area of the screen black and white. You'd point the face of your watch to it and the flickering had data encoded onto it.

Since it's 2026, googling brings me nothing... had to ask Gemini: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCHHzw4s5W4

mikestew 18 minutes ago

For those that don’t feel like watching a video, it was the Times Datalink.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timex_Datalink

mschuster91 an hour ago

> The sketch demonstrated infrared file sharing and other mobile scenarios. Remember infrared file sharing? Of course you don’t.

Oh hell yes I do. Dog slow but at least it worked decently well, something I can't say about Bluetooth.