Remembering The Class of 2006
"It really whips the llama's ass."
Twenty years, and somebody finally got around to organizing one. Took three attempts, two dead mailing lists, and a group chat four people muted inside the first hour.
The Class of 2006 wasn't really a graduating class. It was everything living on a machine you touched on the way there. Some of us started in the early nineties. Some showed up late. A few had already been in the building for years before any of us walked in the door, and nobody ever asked them how long they'd been enrolled.
Some of it you installed on purpose. Some of it installed itself. A few never graduated at all.
Superlatives
Most Likely to SucceedActive Directory
Runs everything. Has had exactly zero new ideas since graduation and has never once needed one. Still the only guy who knows where everybody is, and still the only guy who can lock you out of the building over a typo.
Most Changed Since GraduationJava
You would not recognize him. Different family owns him now, the paperwork went through a couple of times, and every single time you run into him he still asks if you want the toolbar.
Least Changed Since GraduationBawls
Same bottle. Same bumps. Still blue, still tastes like a dare, still here. Twenty years and he hasn't so much as changed the label, which at this point is less a business decision and more a personality.
Most Annoying Couplea Dell Optiplex GX270 and a bulging capacitor
Inseparable. Briefly. You knew before you got the case open, because there's a smell, and then there's that little brown crown sitting on top of it that means the whole cart of them is going the same week. Not that one. The whole cart.
Biggest BetrayalNorton
The man's actual face was on the box. Arms folded, sleeves rolled, looked like he'd personally come over and handle it. His name and his likeness stayed on that packaging for roughly a decade after the company changed hands, which is how a photograph of a guy ends up being the reason you trust something. Then you put it on your aunt's laptop and it takes forty minutes off the boot and eats more machine than it ever caught.
Most ImprovedEthereal
Changed his name to Wireshark in the spring of '06, right before the ceremony, and wouldn't explain why to anybody. Turned out to be a trademark thing. Sobered up, quietly became the most respectable one in the class, and is still the first thing you reach for when nobody believes you.
Most Talkativethe APC UPS with the dead battery
Same point since 2011. Nobody has addressed it. Nobody is going to. It beeps at 3am, it beeps through the all-hands, it beeps during the two minutes of silence, and at this point the beep is load-bearing and everyone's afraid of what happens if it stops.
Most Ignoredthe EULA
Forty-one screens of it. A scroll bar that existed for the sole purpose of turning the button blue at the bottom. Nobody in the history of this class read one, including the people whose actual job it was to read one, and every last one of us clicked I Agree and meant absolutely nothing by it.
Could Not Be RemovedRealPlayer
Uninstalled. Confirmed gone. Restarted, checked twice, checked the tray, went to bed. Back Tuesday.
Most RelaxingDefrag
Everybody watched the blocks. Everybody. There is not one person reading this who didn't sit there at eleven at night with the lights off watching red turn to blue like it was a fireplace, and not one of us will say so out loud.
Most Distributedthe AOL trial discs
More households than any member of this class will ever touch again. Everybody had hundreds, nobody asked for a single one, and they kept coming after you cancelled. Coasters first, then shims under table legs, and then people got weird with it. Earrings. Wind chimes. Somewhere out there a swimming pool tiled entirely in a mosaic of them, which I am about ninety percent sure I actually saw and one hundred percent sure I am not going to go looking for now.
Most Likely to Be Famousthe fifteen-year-old on IRC who was right about everything
You know the one. Right about the bug, right about the vendor, right about what was going to happen, and insufferable about all three. CISO or federal prison. Nobody's checked.
Still Running Somewhere Right Nowa Server 2003 box nobody can find
It's answering. Something depends on it. The port is open and the traffic is real. It's behind drywall, or above a ceiling tile, or in the closet that got sealed during the remodel, and it has been up the entire time, serving something, to someone, faithfully, with a hostname that meant something to a guy who left in 2011.
Still Shows Up to Every ReunionWinamp
Twenty years on. Same jacket, same one joke, still running the skin you built yourself. Everybody's still glad to see him.
Never Went CorporateSoulSeek
Never got bought. Never pivoted. Never had a rebrand or a funding round or a letter from the CEO about an exciting new chapter. When people wanted something different out of the client they just went and wrote one, and Nicotine is still there, still open, still free, still doing it. Every other name from that era eventually came back wearing a new logo with a whitepaper under its arm. He never said a word about any of it.
Most Passive Aggressivethe AIM away message
Never named anybody. Never had to. Everybody knew, including the person it was about, and especially the person it was about.
Most AggressiveYahoo Messenger's BUZZ
One button, and the other person's entire window jumped on their screen with a thud you could hear from the next room. It dropped BUZZ!!! right into the conversation too, so there was no playing it off as an accident. No warning, no opt-out, no cooldown. Somebody four states away could physically move furniture on your desktop and there was nothing in the menu to stop it. MSN had the nudge, which was the same thing with a friendlier name, and nobody ever used either one politely.
ExpelledNapster, 2001
Everybody knew. Nobody named anybody. Lockers got searched anyway, and it wasn't just him who went down... the whole hall lost privileges, the good kids too, and the school's internet has been monitored ever since.
Most Likely to Give You Something You Didn't Ask ForLimeWire, uncontested
Search for one song, get one song, plus four things with the same filename and four different runtimes, plus something that renamed every icon on the desktop and made the CD tray open by itself. Anybody who ran it on the family machine knows exactly which download it was, and has never told anyone.
Voted Most Missedthe BBS
One line. One caller at a time. You'd dial in, get a busy signal, hang up, and redial. For an hour, sometimes. And when you finally got through, there was a real person's actual house on the other end of it. His phone line. His hardware sitting on a card table in a spare room. If somebody in his family needed to make a call you got dropped mid-download, and that was just fair. That was the deal you made.
You had to upload something before you were allowed to download anything. You knew every single person in the message base by name because there were about eleven of them. There was no algorithm, because there was nothing to feed it and nobody to sell it to.
It didn't get bought and it didn't get shut down. The web showed up, everybody wandered off, and by the time anyone thought to look back the phone lines were gone too.
I'm not going to sit here and tell you it was better. Half of it barely worked and the other half was some nincompoop in Kalamazoo arguing about door games. I'm telling you I miss it, which isn't the same thing.
The committee gave WinRAR his own page He'd have taken half the ballot otherwise.
Most Likely to Still Be On Their Trial PeriodWinRAR
Day 7,372 of a 40-day evaluation. The trial ended two decades ago. Nothing happened. Nothing has ever happened.
Most ForgivingWinRAR
Never locked you out. Never escalated, never disabled a feature, never grayed out a button, never sent it to collections. Just kept working and let you carry the guilt around by yourself, which was somehow worse.
Compare that to WinZip, who actually made you click I Agree. Roughly four thousand times. Without you ever once agreeing to anything.
Faculty
Vice Principalthe RIAA
Sent letters home. Not to everybody, and that was the whole trick of it. You just knew somebody who got one, or knew somebody who knew somebody, and that was enough to make the entire hall go quiet for a couple of weeks. Nobody who got one understood a word of it. Every parent who read one was furious anyway.
Detention Monitorthe proxy server
Never actually stopped you. Just wrote all of it down and made real sure somebody could look it up later.
Senior Quotes
- Internet Explorer 6"I'll always be here for you."
- The tape backup"Trust me."
- Windows ME"Not everyone's going to understand me and that's okay."
- Winamp"It really whips the llama's ass."
- WinRAR"The evaluation period has expired."Nothing followed this sentence. Nothing ever did.
- Napster"Nobody's going to find out."
- The AIM away messagesong lyrics, and you know whose they were about.
- A Dell Optiplex GX270"I'm fine."
- The MCSA"This is going to be worth something someday."
- The unlabeled patch cable"You'll figure it out."
Where Are They Now
VMware had a tremendous career, married into money in 2023, hasn't returned a call since, and the whole class is quietly talking about leaving. IE6 is legally dead and still employed at one manufacturing plant that would prefer not to be named. SysInternals is genuinely still good, got bought, and somehow stayed decent anyway. Nagios is still running, config untouched since 2009, and nobody has the password. Napster did his time and came back clean, though the name has been sold so many times nobody can tell you who owns it now. WinRAR is still evaluating you.
The MCSA did not turn out to be worth something.
In Memoriam
The Zip driveClick of death. Went the way it lived.
LimeWire, 2010By court order. Took the family PC with him.
KazaaCause of death, four hundred toolbars.
AIM, 2017Survived by no one. The away message was the only honest thing any of us ever wrote.
Yahoo Messenger, 2018Nobody noticed for a year.
Sign the yearbook
Who'd I leave out, and what's their superlative?
Product and company names are trademarks of their respective holders, used nominatively for commentary and parody. No affiliation or endorsement implied.