These letters matter a lot to kids. I sent my video game idea to Nintendo as a little kid and I had the same reaction seeing that envelope from Nintendo in the mailbox addressed to me. I think it was also a bit more special pre-internet as these companies felt a bit more magical and mysterious. You can only read about them through video game magazines and see their names in the credit scenes at the end of the games. Unless you were one of those weird kids that called Nintendo Power helpline of course!
When I was thirteen I sent an email to Tom Fulp (creator of Newgrounds.com) telling him I wanted to make my own website with Coldfusion (which I had learned about through a pirated copy of DreamWeaver) and MySQL, and asked if would help me make it. [1]
He responded back extremely politely and said that my idea seems like a great idea, but he's far too busy running Newgrounds to build any other websites right now, but once I build it he would love to see it.
I never ended up building the website, but I look back and think it was cool how encouraging he was to some random kid who emailed him.
Kids will pick the weirdest people as "heroes" sometimes, and it's cool when your heroes turn out to be decent humans. Sometimes just responding to an email is all it takes.
[1] I honestly do not remember at all what the website was supposed to be and I don't have the email anymore. Knowing thirteen year old me, it was probably a forum about Donkey Kong Country or something.
Six year old me sent an idea to McDonnell Douglas for an airplane with turboprops to back up the jets in case of engine fire. There was also a fire suppression system. They sent me some nice brochures about the DC-8, -9, and -10, but looking back on it they could have mentioned that the jets are already redundant and will usually stop burning when the fuel is cut.
I so much wish we could all get together as engineers and make a site where kids can write to and send videos etc on and we just praise them and tell them their ideas are good as a community.
In 1997 I typed up a letter to Maxis in Microsoft Creative Writer about how much I liked their games and wanted to move to America and work at Maxis when I grew up:
Unfortunately I made the mistake of mentioning that it'd be cool if you could print out an image of your city in SimCity 2000, as you could in the previous SimCity game. That was enough to get me only this letter from legal as a response:
I don't have a cool story about sending a letter as a kid, although I had drafted one to send to Lego, but have been on the receiving end before. My office is across the street from an elementary school that we have a relationship with, evidenced by the annual trick or treat we host for them. One day roughly every third cubicle or so had a letter at the desk from one of the kids with a cute note. It was clear that our leadership provided the names and we weren't looked up, because mine had my nickname. Anyway, even though it was clearly a class assignment, it was really neat, and I made a reply with official company letterhead and everything in hopes of making the day of the kid who wrote me. Turns out that other peers had the same idea, because when I went to leadership to ask how to return it to the kid (I didn't know his classroom or anything. Just a first name and school address), they had letters from several other employees that they were going to return to the school.
Back then the working class was simply more powerful. Companies had to have good PR, hence feeling 'magical' or 'mysterious.' Of course now in the later stage of capitalism, these execs, investors, etc can just do full-on mask slips.
I think some of this is definitely childhood nostalgia, but its also very different world today. I don't know any kid that sees Nintendo as magical as I did. The Legend of Zelda was this weird, dark, and mysterious thing. So many games were oddly mysterious or weirdly ported from places like Japan, which had their own design language and often the translation was odd which only added to the mystique. Games came out with little to no fanfare and you just had to sort of figure them out. There were cheat books and magazines and such, but generally you had to approach this art with an open heart and open mind and sort of drink it in. If everything is a google or AI search away, then there's no real mystery anymore.
Kids today are forced to be savvy and 'realpolitick' at a young age. They just complain about the pricing and more 'inside baseball' about games and absolutely get a little brain fried by youtube gaming culture that often runs on outrage so no game is good enough. Suddenly, everyone is a critic and magic and love are hard to cultivate in a highly critical environment. Its like everyone is stuck in a Philosophy 101 class with an overly argumentative professor, forever, and its unrelenting and makes us miserable.
Also kids aren't ignorant, in fact they can be very savvy. Games constantly begging them to buy DLCs or sell them microtransaction items absolutely hurt the 'magic.' How can you develop these feelings when you feel like you're locked in the room with a shady used car salesman constantly?
I don't know if kids today can even experience that old magic. At least not in games. It seems now its only in books and getting lost in novels where magic exists now. A book can't beg you to buy an extra chapter or make you pay gems for the next sentence.
In sixth grade language arts class we wrote letters and there were rumors that some companies, if you sent them letters saying you liked their product would send you coupons for free candy/chips/soda/etc.
As a 10y old, my father taught me about logical ports. I took a very large piece of paper and in a few days, I designed a tic tac toe "computer". It had LEDs that indicated the next computer move, based on the position of the pieces: every single possible state of the board led to a specific "next move" led. I do not think it actually would have worked, but of course I was very proud of my design at the time. Unfortunately, when I showed it to my teacher, he did not believe that I was serious. "This is a joke, right?" And that was it. Poor kid me... It did not discourage me however. I was a software engineer for a long time, and now I am a CS teacher. And I (try to) never ever discount the efforts of children.
That really hits home. I spent a couple weeks in primary school sketching my own blueprints for great inventions. Nothing that could've ever worked (I didn't know what a transistor actually was, but my machine certainly had a lot of them!), but in hindsight a good start for a curious tech-minded child - switches that opened/closed circuits, wires to connect the various imaginary lasers and electromagnets, and so on. On the back of the paper I scrawled documentation to remember what the darn thing was actually supposed to do (the biggest one? Save people who fall out of airplanes, which to my 9 year old mind was a big issue that needed to be solved)
One day my teacher noticed me doodling in the back, so she promptly grabbed all the "blueprints" I was so proud of, tore them up, and tossed them in the trash. I guess I get discouraged easier than you though, since I didn't design a thing for many years afterwards.
One of the things that got me in to "coding" when I was 9 years old was building tic tac toe in Excel, locking the window size to 3x3 cells and then implementing clicks as links to the next board state, with the "computer" having already played the next move. The whole sheet had every possible board state written out by hand.
I wrote to Sainsburys (large UK grocery store chain) in 1993, suggesting an idea for a "self checkout", where you would scan items yourself as you put them into your shipping cart. My anti-theft solution was that they'd weigh your cart as you left, to make sure you'd scanned everything!
I never expected a reply, but was so stoked when I received a letter with a similar generic-but-enthusiastic reply, along the lines of "Thanks for such a creative idea!"
Do kids still get the opportunity to experience things like this? I can't imagine that sending an email to a company's generic contact@ address is ever going to get the save kind of response - and certainly not something that they can proudly pin on their wall for motivation.
The problem with that is the benefit of inspiring children does little to nothing for the business, while the risk of frivolous but expensive legal actions because you decide you should get millions for inventing the self service checkout is not insignificant.
I'd suspect many places would still respond positively though, especially in the more creative worlds. Almost every creative was that kid once.
You'd have better luck mailing a letter, but to be honest the kind of "sending a letter and getting a reply from the CEO or some sort of higher up" is long gone unfortunately. There is a few exceptions, but all of them are for very old private companies. You will never get a reply from Pepsi as a kid with a new flavour idea. Or Disney about a new ride for that matter.
Ask a kid (preferably one of your own or a niece or nephew, etc.) to write to your local football team and see what happens. Some are good about it, some aren't. It helps if you send a letter to the correct department instead of sending an email to a generic contact address.
There's a story by a guy who did something similar when he was in 2nd grade, and successfully pitched an aardvark plush to a toy company! It always makes me smile whenever it pops up again.
When I was young I wrote to the Formula 1 team McLaren to ask if they could hire me for a student job. I didn't expect to get a reply, but I got one. The answer was negative, but I was happy. I never reflected about it until now, but maybe it learned me that asking doesn't cost anything, and that the worst thing that can happen is getting a negative answer? Not sure that was the turning point, but this is indeed my approach! :-)
For sure it was a nice experience, I would have done the same, imagine that kid you wrote back gets inspired, goes to study engineering then they come work for you instead of the competition. But nowadays is getting super rare to get human written rejection emails anymore, let alone to kids.
>but maybe it learned me that asking doesn't cost anything, and that the worst thing that can happen is getting a negative answer?
Yeah, but what do you think happens when every kid from the UK asks McLaren for a student job? What happens when everyone from India asks McLaren for a student job?
A kid every couple of months asking you for a job is cute and adorable, 5000 kids asking you for a job per month is a nuisance.
The truth is that this attitude of "it doesn't hurt to ask" only works in high trust societies where people exercise self restraint and all inquiries are done only in good faith, but doesn't scale at all when everyone on the planet starts doing "spray-and-pray" crap shoots and it just quickly becomes spam and overwhelms their capacity to actually read and reply to messages of people who might be genuinely qualified, so we get the issue I mentioned at the start where all messages from applications now first go through ATS and AI bots instead of actual humans.
When I was probably 10 or so, one of the largest computer magazines in the country had a job for a 'junior writer'. My 10yo brain did not realize that junior meant 'just finished the relevant education' and though 'hey, I'm a junior'. So I just called them up and the guy on the other side of the line was clearly confused what to say to me not to disappoint me too much and mumbled something like "the person responsible for hiring is not around". In hindsight, it's pretty ballsy for a kid to just call, if I had to do it ten/fifteen years later I'd have been pretty nervous.
I'm a bit sad that we lose that innocent, carefree attitude later in life.
I think this is one of the ways in which the internet is dangerous for children.
Gen X kids were starving for any adult not their parents to acknowledge their existence. Which made us targets for predators. But now we’ve overcorrected and acknowledgement is routine. That dopamine hit is practically free.
Around this age I went to a water park and was similarly inspired. I had the idea for making an entire water park dedicated to making sure people would get wet and jump onto rides from beginning to end. I called it "Totally Wet People", drew up an elaborate concept art for water slides, sprinklers, pools, tubes, etc. My mom thought it was hilarious and brought it to work (alas, she worked for the Navy at the time, not Disney). I got a lot of second-hand compliments from everyone at her work and it made me feel awesome for at least a couple weeks. Wish I had the forethought to send it to Six Flags or Disney!
Little did you know that your ideas were incorporated into Navy training. The Navy is wet work and you need practice working in such conditions. They unfortunately left out your concessions stands and the water slide. Sorry.
(I know that submariners literally have water obstacle courses where they have to learn to, for instance, do some repairs while a compartment is flooding, but I’ve no idea what the Navy does as a whole).
Ahhhh this makes me so happy. My brother and I, like many, were so obsessed with all the LucasArts adventures, so naturally I mailed them in my idea. I also got a letter back. IIRC it wasn't from a lawyer, but it was definitely a soft "no." There's a chance I still have that letter somewhere.
Man, I am not a "good old days" kind of person but the 80s (well, late 80s early 90s) really were a different time.
What was the reason? Anything beyond concerns over ownership of the ideas, characters, etc. (which I presume is the boilerplate legalese)? Did they even admit to reading your letter?
I remember the wiring, pipes, everything actually went somewhere and was meant for something. Nothing was just for looks and everything served a purpose.
When I was 8 I sent a letter to LEGO about a line of toys that slid down on stair bannister's. I gave it to my mom to send to them but apparently she betrayed me and kept it for herself because she thought it was "cute". Thanks to her I don't work for LEGO :(
I remember sending a letter to Google in 2003? 2004? (I was 13 years old) with my idea. It explained that my mom asks questions to Google instead of using keywords (remember how using the right keywrods was a skill and could affect the results a lot?), and they should fix that.
I event included some PHP code to explain how they could parse the input in question format and convert it to keywords, using regular expression. Ha, how naive. My dream was to receive a letter back saying how a good idea that was and that I was hired.
I remember getting on the gmail beta as a middle schooler and sending feedback. They implemented three of "my ideas" and called them the "Most requested features" each time, so I figured I was the only one sending in feedback lol.
lmao, I was just thinking about this yesterday. My parents would do the same thing and I would try to correct them and explain how they can get better results just typing keywords and not sentences. And here I am in 2026 typing full sentences in Google search so that AI can present me the exact answer directly in the search results.
I did a similar thing with a car design for Mercedes-Benz when I was around the same age. I had all the car drawing books and really thought I was going to be a car designer. Much to my surprise, they responded with enthusiasm and even sent me a Mercedes-Benz keychain :)
It was more likely written by a staff member who thought it would make your day, and signed by the Secretary of Defense. It is pretty neat that you got two letters though, because your letter probably got passed around and made the day of several people.
In 2000 I was in a startup which used yellow and blue colours for all its graphic design (website, app, etc). For a big trade show (IBC Amsterdam) someone thought it would be cool to give away M&Ms, but only in yellow and blue of course ! So we bought many bags of M&Ms, and sorted them out by hand... That wasn't a good use of our time, plus we had tons of red, brown and green M&Ms to eat while working and we were getting diabetic fast.
So Marie called Mars to ask if it was possible to buy only yellow and blue M&Ms for our trade show. And you know what happened? Mars sent us a huge bag of each colour for free !
In the following years, they made it possible to order custom M&Ms (for a price...) and how you can even have your logo on them.
At age 13 I pitched a candy idea to Mars Bars as part of a school project to write business letters. I loved Snickers at the time but was tired of unwrapping so many fun-size ones from Halloween. I told them something like - “you should just put the fun-size candies in a big resealable bag, so people can eat as much as they want without dealing with the wrappers. You can call them unwrapped minis. All you have to do is create new packaging and re-use the fun-size bars!”
I found the CEO’s corporate address somewhere online and sent the letter to him, never to hear back.
Then, around 8 months later, I saw my first ad for Snickers Unwrapped Bites on TV and freaked out. They had immediately implemented my idea, which as a kid was amazing, but I’ll never forgive them for not writing back. Especially because none of my friends ever believed me.
8 months later sounds too short to have taken your idea, I'm guessing launching a product at Mars scale takes like 2 years. This is probably why the always say they cannot take ideas sent by external people... but on the other hand if this came from the CEO, probably could be fast tracked. So 80/20.
Do you remember who was the CEO?
I sent steve jobs (sjobs@apple.com) an email saying that MacOS should have an unspoofable dialog for the system password authorization, same way they have for DRM videos etc. I also suggested the user could choose a secret phrase or image to be displayed in the dialog during system setup. Never heard back. This was when Steve was alive and in charge. And to this day anyone can spoof the system password dialog and steal the system password…
I wonder if they have a policy about not accepting ideas / replying to people don't think their idea was stolen. I know TV shows have that policy so nobody can accuse them of plagiarizing their script idea.
I once mailed the maker of a little German indie game called Clonk about wanting to learn programming. It was my favorite game for a while. Never heard back from him, which I found disappointing.
Now, I answer every single email my app customers are sending me and have been doing this for close to 20 years and I get a lot of positive reviews for the great customer support.
Wow, I didn't expect to see Clonk on HN today! Almost 20 years ago, as a 13 year old in the US I managed to make friends with an older player from Germany, and then we collaborated on making Clonk Rage mods together in c4script. It was an amazing experience and did help me get more into programming, so I'm so sorry to hear about your experience! I do recall members of the development team at the time being accessible and active in the community, specifically Sven2, but I'm not sure about MatthesB.
At the same age I was using the school's phone bill to phone beer companies and request they send me beer mats, so I could swap them with other kids in the playground. And they did, which seems a little off these days.
Reading this I wish I'd set my sights higher, figuratively and literally!
I grew up a nerdy kid in the 80s that liked military airplanes, and on the island I grew up on, was the HQ and manufacturing facility of a local manufacturer of military aircraft, that at the time was named Grumman. They were like a local source of jobs and pride and prestige of something cool to come from the island (second only to Billy Joel, the most famous celebrity of that era from The Island hahaha.)
Anyhow, when I was about 10, I wrote the CEO of Grumman a letter about how great they were talking nerdy about my favorite planes of theirs. The CEO wrote back with a short message thanking me personally. I was so excited, my parents framed it and put it on the wall of my childhood room, etc etc. Only as an adult, well into my 30s, did I remember that and think "OMG, of course his secretary or PR firm wrote that", but I truly couldn't realize that when I was a kid.
Cute story. This reminded me how in elementary school and middle school I used to draw pencil drawings of rollercoasters on my page to pass the time. Rollercoaster tycoon fan :)
I suspect his persistent confidence was already there to lead him to write to Disney in the first place. As a kid, I had an idea like that and my Dad was going to write to the company but he never did, I never had the inclination to do it myself, and now I'm not an actor.
It also takes some awareness to state your age at the start of the letter. That's what makes people respond so well to it. I would never have thought age was relevant, or even that it was shameful to admit you're just a child. I didn't understand how people think. This guy apparently did, so again, he was already cut out for acting, I'd say.
Good insight. Yes, I do remember at the time, purposely thinking I must lead with my age knowing instinctively that somehow that would help me and they would be more likely to pay attention.
When I was a kid I sent a letter to Snapple telling them that they should make Snapple flavored popsicles. They sent me a nice letter telling me it was a good idea. I have not thought about it since. But I wonder if my letter directly lead to this disaster:
"Disaster on a stick
An attempt to erect the world’s largest popsicle in a city square ended with a scene straight out of a disaster film — but much stickier."
Around that age, I wrote a letter to Tandy (Radio Shack), proposing that I write a hobby electronics book.
In hindsight, I wasn't knowledgeable enough to write a printed book's worth of material (maybe a few modern blog posts, at best). But at the time, I knew more about electronics than the other 29 kids in my grade school class, and that constituted most of my worldview, so why couldn't I write a book.
I loved the Forrest Mims books, and, like any kid, wanted to mimic the things that I saw grownups doing.
Someone at Tandy might have realized that I was just an enthusiastic kid, but in any case, they wrote me a nice letter back. The company didn't wish to develop a book at this time, but if I did so on my own, they would be happy to review a copy off the press.
One thing I noticed right away: They never mentioned they would take some inspiration from the submitted design, or acknowledge any specific detail. So they can't get sued for IP infringement later, if they ever build a ride that shares any design details with the "Quadroupler"
When I was a kid in the days of the discman, I came up with the idea of a cigarette-box-sized optical card reader that instead of spin the media it would scan the card and play the songs in it. I called it the "opticard" and thought that would be extremely cool to have some music cards in your pocket instead of carrying inconveniently sized CDs in your belt.
I wanted to write Sony about my idea but never got the balls. Years later they released the minidisc, still bulky, a total flop. The memory stick was a much better idea from them, I never knew why they didn't implement an iPod earlier than Apple
I hadn’t realized Hyperspace mountain in Disneyland Paris went upside down (and launched up) before I took my 6 year old on it - I was assuming it was just a replica of the disneyland one which I thought
He was a bit intimidated by the enhanced strapping, but he liked it still.
I did a similar thing with Roller Coaster Tycoon. I sent screenshots and explanations of my designs to Six Flags. I was probably around 10 or so. I think I got one generic letter back from them unfortunately.
For some time, I wanted to become a Roller Coaster designer.
I wonder how much of a role parents played here. Surely there must have been some help involved with resources, encouragement, and at least getting the letters sent?
I applaud parents who encourage kids to do stuff like this when they have the innate drive for it.
Back when SIM cards were relatively new (and credit-card sized) ca 1997 or so, the vision was that you would plug your SIM card into a landline phone to be able to make/receive calls there. I was working for Motorola at the time and I remember coming up with a couple ideas that I never shared with anyone because I didn’t know who/how.
The first was essentially the iPhone but with a palm pilot type touch screen, the other was a PCMCIA card (which were also much larger back then) that you could put your SIM card into and plug into your laptop to be able to make calls or send/receive faxes on the computer.
Love it. Reminds me of when me and my friends got tired of launching model rockets straight up, so we designed and built a shoulder-mounted model rocket launcher. We made similar drawings and made some dumb mistakes (a face full of rocket heat is scary), but we ultimately succeeded. Kids learn a lot through playing and dreaming.
So wonderful that someone at WED Enterprises chose to reply encouragingly to a 10-year-old kid. “They rejected it straight away, they don't accept unsolicited ideas” or ignoring altogether seems to be the standard legally-defensive response.
Yup, me too. In fact, I might consider simple copyright for something like a board game. Granted, I’ve never registered an actual copyright either. I suppose I should try it out.
He had just joined WED the same year he sent that reply (1979). Worked there until 2020 in various leadership roles. Seems to have been particularly involved in the making
of EPCOT.
A web search shows all kinds of interesting interviews etc.
nogridbag|5 days ago
I remember also receiving that weird VHS tape from Nintendo in the mail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJzIc_c1PvE
I have no idea how I received that, but it was so cool!
tombert|5 days ago
He responded back extremely politely and said that my idea seems like a great idea, but he's far too busy running Newgrounds to build any other websites right now, but once I build it he would love to see it.
I never ended up building the website, but I look back and think it was cool how encouraging he was to some random kid who emailed him.
Kids will pick the weirdest people as "heroes" sometimes, and it's cool when your heroes turn out to be decent humans. Sometimes just responding to an email is all it takes.
[1] I honestly do not remember at all what the website was supposed to be and I don't have the email anymore. Knowing thirteen year old me, it was probably a forum about Donkey Kong Country or something.
projektfu|5 days ago
kraig911|5 days ago
Nition|5 days ago
https://i.imgur.com/1eHcead.jpeg
Unfortunately I made the mistake of mentioning that it'd be cool if you could print out an image of your city in SimCity 2000, as you could in the previous SimCity game. That was enough to get me only this letter from legal as a response:
https://i.imgur.com/Y2wGcRt.jpeg
I did grow up to become a professional game developer though!
andix|5 days ago
I guess they have to deal with so many annoying complaints, so they are really happy if there is something joyful once in a while.
eks391|4 days ago
zoeysmithe|5 days ago
I think some of this is definitely childhood nostalgia, but its also very different world today. I don't know any kid that sees Nintendo as magical as I did. The Legend of Zelda was this weird, dark, and mysterious thing. So many games were oddly mysterious or weirdly ported from places like Japan, which had their own design language and often the translation was odd which only added to the mystique. Games came out with little to no fanfare and you just had to sort of figure them out. There were cheat books and magazines and such, but generally you had to approach this art with an open heart and open mind and sort of drink it in. If everything is a google or AI search away, then there's no real mystery anymore.
Kids today are forced to be savvy and 'realpolitick' at a young age. They just complain about the pricing and more 'inside baseball' about games and absolutely get a little brain fried by youtube gaming culture that often runs on outrage so no game is good enough. Suddenly, everyone is a critic and magic and love are hard to cultivate in a highly critical environment. Its like everyone is stuck in a Philosophy 101 class with an overly argumentative professor, forever, and its unrelenting and makes us miserable.
Also kids aren't ignorant, in fact they can be very savvy. Games constantly begging them to buy DLCs or sell them microtransaction items absolutely hurt the 'magic.' How can you develop these feelings when you feel like you're locked in the room with a shady used car salesman constantly?
I don't know if kids today can even experience that old magic. At least not in games. It seems now its only in books and getting lost in novels where magic exists now. A book can't beg you to buy an extra chapter or make you pay gems for the next sentence.
LtdJorge|5 days ago
Wowfunhappy|5 days ago
Wait, the villains have Sega and Sony logos. How were they able to do that legally?
Forgeties79|5 days ago
dfinlay|5 days ago
dhosek|5 days ago
Lightstate|5 days ago
They sent me a letter thanking me and said that they don't develop games in a nice way.
I immediately filed that letter with the orange Sony letterhead and still have it til this day.
Good times.
dfxm12|5 days ago
ge96|5 days ago
I don't remember this episode of Firefly
janwillemb|5 days ago
ileonichwiesz|5 days ago
One day my teacher noticed me doodling in the back, so she promptly grabbed all the "blueprints" I was so proud of, tore them up, and tossed them in the trash. I guess I get discouraged easier than you though, since I didn't design a thing for many years afterwards.
nathancahill|5 days ago
nedt|4 days ago
Roedou|5 days ago
I never expected a reply, but was so stoked when I received a letter with a similar generic-but-enthusiastic reply, along the lines of "Thanks for such a creative idea!"
Do kids still get the opportunity to experience things like this? I can't imagine that sending an email to a company's generic contact@ address is ever going to get the save kind of response - and certainly not something that they can proudly pin on their wall for motivation.
dizzy3gg|5 days ago
hennell|5 days ago
I'd suspect many places would still respond positively though, especially in the more creative worlds. Almost every creative was that kid once.
dubcanada|5 days ago
dfxm12|5 days ago
noncovalence|5 days ago
https://twitter-thread.com/t/1214607304106098689
raphinou|5 days ago
joe_mamba|5 days ago
For sure it was a nice experience, I would have done the same, imagine that kid you wrote back gets inspired, goes to study engineering then they come work for you instead of the competition. But nowadays is getting super rare to get human written rejection emails anymore, let alone to kids.
>but maybe it learned me that asking doesn't cost anything, and that the worst thing that can happen is getting a negative answer?
Yeah, but what do you think happens when every kid from the UK asks McLaren for a student job? What happens when everyone from India asks McLaren for a student job?
A kid every couple of months asking you for a job is cute and adorable, 5000 kids asking you for a job per month is a nuisance.
The truth is that this attitude of "it doesn't hurt to ask" only works in high trust societies where people exercise self restraint and all inquiries are done only in good faith, but doesn't scale at all when everyone on the planet starts doing "spray-and-pray" crap shoots and it just quickly becomes spam and overwhelms their capacity to actually read and reply to messages of people who might be genuinely qualified, so we get the issue I mentioned at the start where all messages from applications now first go through ATS and AI bots instead of actual humans.
microtonal|5 days ago
I'm a bit sad that we lose that innocent, carefree attitude later in life.
hinkley|5 days ago
Gen X kids were starving for any adult not their parents to acknowledge their existence. Which made us targets for predators. But now we’ve overcorrected and acknowledgement is routine. That dopamine hit is practically free.
TheGRS|5 days ago
hinkley|5 days ago
(I know that submariners literally have water obstacle courses where they have to learn to, for instance, do some repairs while a compartment is flooding, but I’ve no idea what the Navy does as a whole).
riffraff|5 days ago
wordglyph|5 days ago
chaps|5 days ago
Feel like that opened something in me..
virgil_disgr4ce|5 days ago
Ahhhh this makes me so happy. My brother and I, like many, were so obsessed with all the LucasArts adventures, so naturally I mailed them in my idea. I also got a letter back. IIRC it wasn't from a lawyer, but it was definitely a soft "no." There's a chance I still have that letter somewhere.
Man, I am not a "good old days" kind of person but the 80s (well, late 80s early 90s) really were a different time.
dfxm12|5 days ago
d--b|5 days ago
I love that kids could be left alone in their home and would burn plastic over a gas stove to create models of roller coasters.
I love that Disney would respond to him and not even forget the typo in quadrupuler.
I love that he kept all that and thought of it as a foundational part of his personality (I think probably he was already like that)
droidjj|5 days ago
bsza|5 days ago
aethrum|5 days ago
ramblin_ray|5 days ago
I remember the wiring, pipes, everything actually went somewhere and was meant for something. Nothing was just for looks and everything served a purpose.
Still hasn't been built to this day ;P
danparsonson|4 days ago
weirdmantis69|5 days ago
insensible|5 days ago
101008|5 days ago
I event included some PHP code to explain how they could parse the input in question format and convert it to keywords, using regular expression. Ha, how naive. My dream was to receive a letter back saying how a good idea that was and that I was hired.
Unfortunately I never got a response back.
scottyah|5 days ago
ashleyn|5 days ago
nogridbag|5 days ago
psygn89|5 days ago
davkan|5 days ago
eks391|4 days ago
wazoox|5 days ago
In the following years, they made it possible to order custom M&Ms (for a price...) and how you can even have your logo on them.
RobCodeSlayer|5 days ago
I found the CEO’s corporate address somewhere online and sent the letter to him, never to hear back.
Then, around 8 months later, I saw my first ad for Snickers Unwrapped Bites on TV and freaked out. They had immediately implemented my idea, which as a kid was amazing, but I’ll never forgive them for not writing back. Especially because none of my friends ever believed me.
earlyriser|5 days ago
EGreg|5 days ago
MattGrommes|5 days ago
foobarian|5 days ago
cm2012|5 days ago
WA|5 days ago
Now, I answer every single email my app customers are sending me and have been doing this for close to 20 years and I get a lot of positive reviews for the great customer support.
personalcompute|5 days ago
Thanks for the nostalgia though. Amazing game.
cs02rm0|4 days ago
Reading this I wish I'd set my sights higher, figuratively and literally!
morganf|5 days ago
Anyhow, when I was about 10, I wrote the CEO of Grumman a letter about how great they were talking nerdy about my favorite planes of theirs. The CEO wrote back with a short message thanking me personally. I was so excited, my parents framed it and put it on the wall of my childhood room, etc etc. Only as an adult, well into my 30s, did I remember that and think "OMG, of course his secretary or PR firm wrote that", but I truly couldn't realize that when I was a kid.
Windchaser|5 days ago
ahhhh this makes me feel things
donkeyboy|5 days ago
foxglacier|5 days ago
It also takes some awareness to state your age at the start of the letter. That's what makes people respond so well to it. I would never have thought age was relevant, or even that it was shameful to admit you're just a child. I didn't understand how people think. This guy apparently did, so again, he was already cut out for acting, I'd say.
wordglyph|5 days ago
regus|5 days ago
"Disaster on a stick An attempt to erect the world’s largest popsicle in a city square ended with a scene straight out of a disaster film — but much stickier."
https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna8321110
neilv|5 days ago
In hindsight, I wasn't knowledgeable enough to write a printed book's worth of material (maybe a few modern blog posts, at best). But at the time, I knew more about electronics than the other 29 kids in my grade school class, and that constituted most of my worldview, so why couldn't I write a book.
I loved the Forrest Mims books, and, like any kid, wanted to mimic the things that I saw grownups doing.
Someone at Tandy might have realized that I was just an enthusiastic kid, but in any case, they wrote me a nice letter back. The company didn't wish to develop a book at this time, but if I did so on my own, they would be happy to review a copy off the press.
(Edit: I mean, there was a mailing address right there, on the back cover. In a kid's mind, why couldn't you simply mail a letter to that address. https://archive.org/details/gettingstartedin00mims/page/n131... )
zannic|5 days ago
psyclobe|5 days ago
tonyvince7|5 days ago
lysace|5 days ago
andix|5 days ago
Kuyawa|4 days ago
I wanted to write Sony about my idea but never got the balls. Years later they released the minidisc, still bulky, a total flop. The memory stick was a much better idea from them, I never knew why they didn't implement an iPod earlier than Apple
prpl|5 days ago
He was a bit intimidated by the enhanced strapping, but he liked it still.
Cshelton|5 days ago
I did a similar thing with Roller Coaster Tycoon. I sent screenshots and explanations of my designs to Six Flags. I was probably around 10 or so. I think I got one generic letter back from them unfortunately.
For some time, I wanted to become a Roller Coaster designer.
yakkomajuri|5 days ago
I applaud parents who encourage kids to do stuff like this when they have the innate drive for it.
quailfarmer|5 days ago
unknown|5 days ago
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v8xi|4 days ago
zendist|5 days ago
I sent it to Nokia over email :-D. They didn't respond.
Dual SIM phones apparently became a thing that same year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_SIM#:~:text=The%20first%2... Not originally by Nokia, though.
dhosek|5 days ago
The first was essentially the iPhone but with a palm pilot type touch screen, the other was a PCMCIA card (which were also much larger back then) that you could put your SIM card into and plug into your laptop to be able to make calls or send/receive faxes on the computer.
fortzi|5 days ago
llasse|5 days ago
unknown|5 days ago
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mattmon-og|5 days ago
I actually got a personal response thanking me for my input!
Then a few years later that keyboard I wanted actually became a product.
Not sure if I really influenced their process or not; but I got that keyboard and its fun to think I did :)
hodder|5 days ago
bze12|5 days ago
-Brian-|5 days ago
divbzero|5 days ago
TZubiri|5 days ago
Drop the "It's called" it's cleaner that way.
wordglyph|5 days ago
stevage|5 days ago
I'm curious about this - I thought it was a very expensive process to patent something.
codazoda|5 days ago
tolerance|5 days ago
They sent our boy an advertisement.
Oh, joy, where’ve you been left?
notxorand|5 days ago
metabagel|5 days ago
mikkupikku|5 days ago
aurea|5 days ago
lysace|5 days ago
He had just joined WED the same year he sent that reply (1979). Worked there until 2020 in various leadership roles. Seems to have been particularly involved in the making of EPCOT.
A web search shows all kinds of interesting interviews etc.
RyanOD|5 days ago
eboy|5 days ago
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