Rough guess but this is all content farming of Raymond Chen posts at https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/ though I can't find a smoking gun. I definitely remember an article about Intuit doing something some dumb they had to keep an internal API around reporting the wrong value or something like that.

Here's the reference to the testing scheme that Windows 95 came up with from Raymond Chen's blog - https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20050824-11/?p=34...

  Buy up one copy of every software package available at Egghead Software and have your team test it and file bugs.