I was 17 when VB6 came out, working at a local computer store, and getting into programming but couldn't afford $500 to by the pro edition.

One day, I happened to read an article that said they were given a free copy of VB6 to review for the magazine.

My 17yo mind was blown! Hundreds of dollars worth of software given away for free? Just for writing an article?! I could do that!

Having nothing to lose, I called Microsoft's PR department and requested a copy. Told them I published a newsletter about computers and was based in Queens, NY. Their only question? Where should they send the software lol

It was literally that easy. A single phone call with zero verification about me, my newsletter, and my so-called publishing company.

And it was Enterprise edition which retailed for over $1,000. For little 17yo me!

Naturally, I kept calling for more software. Office, Windows 98/NT, Encarta... you name it.

I even started calling other companies and published a single edition of the newsletter, in case anyone asked for a copy but no one ever did. All they wanted to know was where they should send the software.

One of my favorite free items was course on VB which came on 6 VHS cassettes. The lessons I learned from those tapes built the foundation of my programming carrier.

Of course, older me understands the economics of sending people a few bits of plastic & paper in exchange for press coverage but the joy I felt getting that software in the mail still hasn't left my mind.

Good times =D

They still do this in a formal way and i promise i don't work for MS in any way; It's called Microsoft for startups and you sign up with vague details about a startup and they throw 5 enterprise visual studio keys and 5 full office subscriptions your way along with a few thousand dollars of azure hosting credits to get you hooked.

About 20 years ago the Microsoft for Startups program included the full MSDN subscription which was ~5 keys for every product they ever made. 5 keys of Windows XP, 5 keys for windows server, 5 keys for 2000, 5 keys for every variant of Office. Very popular at LAN parties and they never did recall any of those keys. Today it seems they just give you developer tools and office, not the OS.

One of the programs I enjoyed writing the most with VB6 was a telephony capable IM program. Over dial up!

The IM portion was simple logic but the real-time voice was a challenge back then because audio compression was in its infancy. The few real-time compression libraries that existed were expensive to license and some even required royalties. Way out of my league.

At the same time, writing a compression algorithm myself was beyond my abilities. There weren't any VHS courses on that topic yet haha.

My solution was to use the recording control that came with VB6. I couldn't set the audio bitrate with that control but, if I had the recorder append the recording to an existing file, it would use the bitrate defined in that existing file.

So I created a teeny tiny wave file with 0 seconds of audio, included it with the program binary, and used a copy of it to seed & set the bitrate of each conversation.

Since they weren't compressed, the file integrity was very forgiving. I was able to pull out a chunk of data from anywhere in the audio file, put it into its own file, and it would play the extracted chunk of audio just fine.

So, that's what I did. I used the VB6 recording control with my low bitrate seed file to record their voice, had my code grab 1 second chunks of audio from that file, "stream" it to the other end of the line, write the data to disk, and use another VB6 control to play it for the recipient.

Surprisingly, the sound wasn't choppy at all. The audio quality was low, since the bitrate was in the low dozens but the conveyer belt of 1 second wave files being played back to back to back was not noticeable at all.

Ended up selling a bunch of copies.

Fun times =D