Happy 19th anniversary to freecupholder.exe
2025: The free cupholder you can download is an .STL of a cupholder you can print out in a 3D printer.
this post was submitted on 24 May 2025
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Except the OP image says .exe so that's not all that came in the package...
The STL is in a self extracting zip file that runs as an exe, no need to be suspicious
Trust me bro.
Killatia is a lucky person. Running an .exe from an unknown source
It was a more innocent time. I was introduced to cupholder.exe from my mom, who got it from a coworker’s chain email, as all things spread in those days. I think it might have specifically been called a coke can holder in the email because we were in the south, lol.
2006? No way. 1996, sure, but by 2006 this was already a bonehead move.
Gonna be honest, I somehow missed all the dates on this post because I zeroed in on freecupholder.exe, lmao. Late 90s was when I saw it first, but it’s totally believable to me that people were doing this in 2006.
Pretty sure emailing executables was nuked by 2006.
Not nuked, and that's not a screenshot of email.
Think I still have Coke.exe, same thing, unless a virus scanner finally nuked it.
I remember downloading and running random EXEs on my school's NT4 machines.
There was a few joke programs, the one I remember right now, would make the start button jump around on the screen.
This was also around the time we all got on MSN Messenger, but us cool kids used an alternative client, Trillian, or later, Miranda IM.
A clear favorite of the time was the demo versions of Unreal Tournament 99 and Return To Castle Wolfenstein, both was easily installed, ran decent on the computer and had LAN multiplayer, there were a few impromptu LAN parties after school...
Later in my education I attended a trade school where I took networking classes.
Someone had snuck in a copy of Age Of Empires 2 on all machines in the lab, so we spent the days setting up a network, and after school was over, we gamed on it.
Brilliant fun!
In the days of AOL Instant Messenger, or AIM as all us cool kids called it, I recall a similarish little trick.
You'd tell your friend you were going to hack their computer and then send them a photo. The trick is that the photo was actually a link to "A:\virus.jpeg" which would cause their floppy drive to start up and look for a disk to look for a file. Since floppy drives were loud it would cause their computer to "chunk-a-lunk-lunk" which would obviously then scare your friend.
You could also do it with the "D" drive, but it was less reliable since I think it had to have an actual disk in there already (which was common), but it was also usually quieter.
Yes and there would be a 50% chance it would permanently wreck your PC
It was such a magical moment in time
Dude opens a random .exe file a rando with a doctor Strangelove image posted online. Either balls or ignorance.
Don't they often go hand in hand?
Personal robot assistant powered by cloud distributed software.
#! /usr/bin/bash
PATH=/usr/local/bin:/bin:/usr/bin
eject -r
Kind of surprised they didn’t have a batch file command for this. I’m guessing people had to build a whole MFC application just to call the eject API.
It was actually quite simple from what i remember. There was a plain winapi call to control multimedia devices, the mmc api. You could send a control string to the device, such as eject, play or seek. So in maybe 4 lines of C code, this could be written.
Disclaimer: All info from the top of my head based on knowledge from 20 years ago, so take it as it is.
That sounds about right for 4 lines of code to make the call itself. But I remember using VC++ and since everything was a GUI you’d create a project which gave you a bunch of template generated code with all the MFC and WinAPI libs and frameworks…
You had the option. You could create a fullblown mfc application (in a couple of variants such as single document, multiple document and dialog based), but also a barebones plain winapi one. And a for a DLL too. I miss those simpler times of winapi coding, i found it fun. I moved away from windows as an OS around the time .Net 2.0 was released. Now when I look at modern windows development, I recognise absolutely NOTHING lol. Does winapi even exist still under all those layers?
I got that over IRC in the late 90s. It’s over 25 years old.
Good times
Why does Dr Strangelove have vertical glare lines down his face? It’s like someone took a picture of the DVD cover to use this as an avatar.
pretty sure that's the smoke of the cigarette
Oh I’m blind. My bad.