If Microsoft made TV Dinners
You must first remove the plastic cover, but understand that it means agreeing to accept and honor Microsoft rights to all TV dinners. You may not give anyone else a bite of your dinner (which would constitute an infringement of Microsoft's rights). They may, however, smell and look at your dinner. You must tell them how good it is.
If you have a PC microwave oven, insert the dinner into the oven. Set the oven using these keystrokes: <\mstv.dinn.//08.5min@50%heat//> You then enter: <ms//start.cook_dindin/yummy\|/yum~yum:-)gohot#cookme>.
If you have a Mac oven, insert the dinner and press start. The oven will recognize the MS TV Dinner, configure itself, and cook the dinner automatically.
If you have a Unix oven, insert the dinner, enter the ingredients of the dinner (found on the package label), the weight of the dinner, and the desired level of cooking and press start. The oven will calculate the time and heat, and cook the diner precisely.
Be forewarned that Microsoft dinners are subject to frequent crashes, in which case your oven must be restarted. This is a simple procedure. Remove the dinner from the oven and enter <ms.nodamn.good/tryagain\again/again.crap>. This process may have to be repeated. Try unplugging the microwave and then doing a cold reboot. If this doesn't work, contact your hardware vendor.
Many users have reported that the dinner tray is far too big, larger than the dinner itself, having many useless compartments, most of which are empty. Microsoft says these are for future menu items. However, the tray is so large that it will only fit in the largest industrial ovens, forcing many users to upgrade.
Dinners are only available from registered outlets, and only the chicken variety is currently produced. If you want another variety, call Microsoft Help and they will explain that you really don't want another variety. Microsoft Chicken is all you really need.
Microsoft has disclosed plans to discontinue all smaller versions of their chicken dinners. Future releases will only be in the larger family size. Excess chicken may be stored for future use, but must be saved only in Microsoft approved packaging.
Users get excited about having veggies with their Microsoft dinners, often telling their friends about it, as though this were something new. Microsoft promises a dessert with every dinner after 98. However, that version has yet to be released. Users have permission to get thrilled in advance.
The box for the TV dinners is so large that it will not fit in many smaller freezers, and the shape prevents the storage of any other brand of dinners. Microsoft dinners are often not compatible with other dinners in the freezer, causing your freezer to self-defrost. Calling Microsoft Help will elicit the explanation that this is not a bug, but a feature, as your freezer probably should have been defrosted anyway.
Addendum 1 to MS TV Dinner News, from the Chief Technology Officer, MSTVD: None of this will be an issue for MS TV Dinner98. A paradigm shift has changed the way we think of TV Dinners and Microwaves, and the new MS interface to TV dinners now owns the entire Microwave desktop, which will be henceforth known as the ActiveMicrowave*. This will allow a wide bandwidth for merchandisers and financier markets to gain a new and unique foothold on the consumer, providing access and services to every user in every home, right next to the julienne sliced carrots, corn bread and refried beans. Low-level interfacing with Web TV is now being beta tested in a local market of barca-loungers.
Addendum 2 to MS TV Dinner News:
In case you were looking for the Manual, Microsoft no longer ships manuals
with TV dinners. You must now use the Oven Help file which will be
displayed on your microwave oven's 20-character information screen. This is
actually much better than having manuals because it will always be current
and you won't have to find a place to store it. You may, however, need to
add more memory to your microwave oven, but it will work better with more
memory anyway. You may also wish to consider getting a monitor for your
microwave oven so you can read more than 20 characters of your helpfile at a
time, and if you do that you might as well get an OvenCam so you can watch
your food cook on the monitor. That's much easier than trying to see your
food cook through all those holes in the radiation shield. Your neighbours,
who you know to be power cookers, probably already have one and are already
enjoying their oven experiences more than you are.
Follow up news article:
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.-Aug. 1, 1997 - Sun Microsystems, Inc. and Netscape
Communications Corp. (NASDAQ: NSCP) today announced the developer release of
the Java TV Dinner SDK, a comprehensive set of meal components and services
designed to simplify preparation of dinner. Unlike platform-specific
solutions, Java TV Dinner lets developers "cook once, eat anywhere."
"I cooked dinner on my wristwatch and then crawled inside my microwave to
eat it," said Marc Andreessen, Sr. VP of Technology at Netscape. "Damn near
busted the door off, but boy, was it ever convenient."
Meal components include beans, peas, zucchini, nonfat blueberry frozen
yogurt, penne pasta, and some leftover beef panang. IBM will provide a
great big huge rare steak with potatoes and gravy and hollandaise sauce, and
Oracle will provide that icky green stuff that you find inside a lobster
shell. Services include spoons and knives. Forks will be provided in a
future version of the product.
If there is no menu on the left side of the screen, you need to click here to activate the menu.