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If you haven't ever played Solitaire, Minesweeper, Hearts or FreeCell, it's safe to say you're in the minority. These simple Windows games have probably caused more lost worker hours than anything short of a worldwide coffee shortage. Whichever one was your favorite, the temptation to take just one more go at beating them—to get a faster time or a better score—was hard to ignore.
But as fun as these games were, they weren't actually designed for entertainment. At least not in their Windows incarnations.
The oldest of the four, Microsoft Solitaire, was first added to Windows 3.0 in 1990. Although the game (sometimes called "Patience") has existed since the late 1700s, this digital version seemed to be demonstrating that in the future we would no longer require a physical deck to play simple card games. But that's not what it was doing at all. Its real aim was far more modest: it was teaching mouse-fluency by stealth.
The intention was that Solitaire would get a generation of computer users still most familiar with a command-line input to teach themselves how to drag and drop, without realizing that's what they were doing. The fact that we're still dragging and dropping today suggests that it worked rather well.
It is highly probable that SN members were aware of the true purpose of these games but the article seemed interesting nevertheless.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Hairyfeet on Monday August 17 2015, @08:21AM
So I thought it would be best to leave this here, another tool to kill Windows 10 spying [softpedia.com], I don't have time ATM (getting ready to move) so if somebody wants to try this and then run a traffic analysis and see if it kills Win 10 spying like Raid kills bugs? I'm sure many here would like to know. Also if you plan to try to gut it manually you'll need access to GPEdit which does not come on Windows Home systems, but that is okay because old Hairy found a way add GPEdit to home systems [deviantart.com]. I don't currently have any Win 10 systems running at the shop to test it on but on Win 7 and 8? Works great,just type gpedit.msc into the run dialog and up it comes.
While I doubt there are any other shop guys here I bet a lot have relatives that have gotten "Win 10'd" and if this helps you get rid of the spying I'm glad, just let us know what your findings are.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.