<p>Back in the summer of '69 (well, 2009), Windows 7 was launched, amid much fanfare. Microsoft, desperate to get things right in the wake of that god-awful Vista, got desperate with its marketing: it bribed people to have Windows 7 launch parties. Yes, parties. With Windows. This is the story of a survivor.</p><p>The premise of the Windows launch party was simple: nerdy geeks like myself would invite a bunch of friends round, Microsoft would send us a load of goodies, and then we'd have a Windows Install party.</p><p>There were a few problems with this plan, as you'd imagine. First, the type of nerdy geek-outs who didn't drop dead laughing at the idea of a WINDOWS PARTY are not the sort of geeks who would have friends to invite to a party. More problematically, even if a group of people did manage to tear themselves away from IRC long enough to make it into the real world, they weren't exactly going to cause much of a buzz in mainstream social media. I mean, we're talking about a day and age when you could add people on MySpace non-ironically.</p><p>So at this point, you're probably wondering: what the hell were you doing signing up for, honestly, the crappest social event of the season? Well, you see, a Windows 7 Launch Party host got a bunch of Windows 7 goodies: specifically, 10 brand-spanking-new copies of Windows 7. For an impoverished student, that's a pretty big deal.</p><p><a href="http://www.gizmodo.co.uk/2013/06/my-windows-7-launch-party-disaster-or-how-i-emailed-steve-ballmer-porn/">Keep reading...</a></p>