Drunk Van Halen fan called Microsoft support and demanded to speak to Gates

Some support calls become memorable because of the technical problem. Others stick in the mind because the caller has apparently consumed an adult beverage or three before demanding to speak to the boss. Microsoft veteran Raymond Chen has shared one from the latter category. His tale comes from a now-retired colleague who once staffed Microsoft's FrontPage support line. The caller was building a Van Halen fan site using FrontPage, and it wasn't going well. A Java applet was supposed to play music, but the caller could not make it work. FrontPage began life in 1995 at Vermeer Technologies, which Microsoft soon acquired. Redmond released its own version in 1996 and kept the HTML editor alive through FrontPage 2003. Mainstream support ended in 2009 and extended support in 2014. The name "FrontPage" will likely make administrators and developers who remember it shudder. It relied on proprietary FrontPage Server Extensions for Microsoft's Internet Information Services (IIS). The remains lingered remarkably long. …