IT Insights Blog — Microsoft Office

Did you ever wonder, as a child, what you would do for a living as an adult? Almost every kid wants to do something glamorous. Fight fires. Walk on the moon. Be a movie star. Join the circus as a lion tamer. Become the President of the United States. Sometimes the dreams get slightly more refined as a teenager: Learn to play the guitar and start a rock band, for example. Or maybe win a cooking competition on TV and become a world-famous restaurateur like Guy Fieri.

Once upon about five tons of hair gel and many, many dope threads ago, a vocal quintet from Boston (more specifically from Dorchester) burst onto the late-1980s music scene with the release of smooth ditty called "Please Don't Go Girl." Thus was the origin of New Edition. Or was it N Sync? Or maybe that's how Backstreet Boys came to be. Or it perhaps could have been 98 Degrees. The point is not what they called themselves, but that they were part of a teen boy band new wave.

Among the notable births of the year 1988 are Tiffany Two, the world's oldest known house cat (died at age 27 in 2015); Steph Curry, two-time NBA MVP and star point guard of the Golden State Warriors; Adele (birth name: Adele Laurie Blue Adkins), singer-songwriter and one of history's top-selling recording artists; and Japan's famous Tokyo Dome sports venue.

Twenty-four years ago, Microsoft launched one of the best remembered ad campaigns in the history of Madison Avenue. The focus of the campaign, albeit elliptically, was the then-pending release of Windows 95, the 15th iteration of the world's most ubiquitous (even at the time) computer operating system. The tag line, "Where do you want to go today," is still alive and well in the vernacular.

The origin of the phrase "Back to square one" is highly disputed among etymologists. Some believe the term derived from the popular board game Chutes and Ladders, while others claim its origins must come from the playground pastime hopscotch. Another popular theory is that the phrase originated with BBC radio commentators calling a game of football. (That's "soccer" to all of our American readers.)