[RyJones]

We were working on Windows on ARM for the Surface tablets (funny story: I worked in the office of the CTO of Microsoft in 2008? 2009? and we had a couple of the original Surfaces. Cool machines to demo) and we had a couple of the tablets. We needed like 20 to do testing. We were able to get a couple more. I think the chargeback was on the order of $50k each.

None of them were the same. One of the best engineers I ever worked with, who I'll call Bill, had to reverse-engineer how to JTAG each one to re-flash them, since each tablet was slightly different and undocumented.

Bill was one of the guys in the late 90s, early 2000s that was cracking satellite cards for fun. He also reverse engineered a bunch of CANBUS stuff for another product group. Good times.

Anyways, we all knew it sucked.

[mlrtime]

What does it mean to work "in the office of the CTO"? On the surfance it sounds like an admin.

Also, hacking satellite cards was fun, I kinda miss those days. Kids don't know how easy they have it now.

[JoshTriplett]

> What does it mean to work "in the office of the CTO"?

Many companies have a small research division directly reporting to the CTO. It usually has the implication of "experimental research at the discretion of the CTO, may become something production later in which case it'll move elsewhere".

[RyJones]

We just had a couple surfaces.

I was working on a semantic web parser engine tool.