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Did you know there are two different holograms on old boxes of Windows 95? I didn’t. Did you know one of them has a child with no top pointing at Microsoft on a monitor, which a government complained about and got changed? I also did not know that.
Yet now I do, thanks to a blog from Microsoft’s Raymond Chen. The anti-piracy holograms were a way of assuring the buyer of a copy of Windows 95 that the product was legitimate. They’re incredibly hard to fake, or just cost too much to produce, so even if one could successfully mimic the look of a Windows 95 box, they couldn’t mimic the hologram.
The original hologram design had a baby sitting, which, when you moved the box, would show the child pointing and looking at the PC. In it, the baby had no top on.
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Harking back to a separate blog post they wrote back in 2003, Chen claims a government (which “shall remain nameless for obvious reasons”) saw that baby with no top, and while the hologram cuts off below the waist, assumed it to be entirely naked anyway. Microsoft then had to swiftly put out a second box with a fresh anti-piracy hologram, this time giving the baby a shirt and overalls.
As this was rushed to production, the second fully clothed hologram did not point at the Microsoft logo on the monitor. If you’re wondering why Chen wrote this blog post now, over 20 years later, it’s because a user posted a YouTube short of the original half-clothed baby hologram, which has seemingly become quite rare.
In 2003, Chen lamented that Windows “brings out the Rorschach test in everyone” and said: “If the baby in your hologram isn’t wearing a shirt, you have a genuine collector’s item.”
I’m not too sure I want a collector’s item purely because one world government thought it depicted a naked baby, but it certainly does seem pretty rare, and it’s got to be one of the strangest anti-piracy holograms out there.
Given Windows 95 came out in, you guessed it, 1995, and the baby was likely a few years old at the time of making the hologram, one can assume the baby is now in at least their mid 30s. Here’s hoping for Windows 12; we get a recreation of the Hologram with the now 30-something-year-old, but please keep the overalls this time.
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