The team behind Windows NT sent 'black cardboard coffins' and fake dog poop to their rivals back in the 90s, because nerds

No matter how smart you are, there’s always room for a little childish fun. Or an ominous threat to your rivals, one of the two. Ex-Microsoft engineer Dave Plummer interviewed the chief architect and designer of Windows NT, Dave Cutler, on his YouTube channel back in 2023, and I’ve just got around to the highlights after he reshared it on X.

By highlights I mean, the juicy stuff. Plummer kicks off asking Cutler about a “legend” regarding a gift sent to competing Sun Microsystems around the launch of Windows NT, and he was only too happy to provide the details.

“We decided that [Sun Microsystems co-founder] Scott McNealy was kind of mealy-mouthed, and there were some other people around that were a little bit that way too,” said Cutler, directly referencing Lee Reiswig at IBM. “Somebody, and I don’t know who it was… found these black cardboard coffins, and they were about two feet long.”

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“So we decided that we would send Scott McNealy and Lee Reiswig a coffin, and we would put a special message in it,” Cutler continued. “We found a birthday card that played the Death March… so we sent one of these to Lee Reiswig, and we sent one to Scott McNealy.” So far, so oddly macabre. However, the fun didn’t stop there:

“At the time, Sun was running ads with… they had a dog, and the dog’s name was Network,” Cutler continued. “And Scott McNealy is reputed to have brought Network on the stage at one of his talks, with a fire hydrant, and had the dog go over and urinate on the fire hydrant, and it said Microsoft.”

Dogmeat

(Image credit: Bethesda Softworks)

A low blow, for sure. However, Cutler and the team had a… well, let’s just say it was a fitting response:

“We got some fake dog doo and put it in the box… both of these we had hand delivered, so we know that they actually showed up.”

“We had a third one,” Cutler helpfully adds. “I forget who we were going to send the third. The third one might have been going to Larry Ellison or somebody else… but that one never went off.”

I’m sure Ellison is mopping his brow in relief. Anyway, it sure got feisty back in the day between tech nerds, didn’t it? While I think the coffins may be viewed in a less positive light if they were sent between rivals today, fake dog poop? Sure thing. Better than a slanging match on X, don’tcha think?