[HN Gopher] Matterport walkthrough of the original Microsoft Bui...
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Matterport walkthrough of the original Microsoft Building 3
Author : uticus
Score : 65 points
Date : 2025-07-16 18:25 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (my.matterport.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (my.matterport.com)
| Helithumper wrote:
| Relevant Blogpost:
| https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20250708-00/?p=11...
| mynameisash wrote:
| > when you went looking for room 2352, you didn't know what color
| wing it was in.
|
| I worked in building 6 for a while. That was frustrating because
| the two halves of the building were mirror images. If I had to go
| to the other side of the building for a meeting, I got
| disoriented and thought I knew the way back to my office, but I
| kept getting it wrong. It's like the Upside Down.
| avidiax wrote:
| Microsoft campuses were always impossible to navigate. The
| buildings are numbered in the Japanese style, i.e.
| chronologically.
|
| Why not number buildings on a battleship grid? Building B6 must
| be adjacent to A6 and B7, as opposed to building 40 being
| adjacent to 27. Why not prefix the office numbers of an X-wing
| building with cardinal directions? If you see office N202, and
| you need office W107, head to the core, down the stairs, and
| one hallway to the left.
| abeyer wrote:
| Not to mention that some people always used the golf course
| code names for clusters of buildings, too... which were never
| "official" so there wasn't even any signage or anything to
| refer to for those. I remember being pointed to a pile of
| "stuff new people ought to know but HR won't tell you" on
| some random share in NTDEV when I started and it had a map
| with those marked on it.
| canucker2016 wrote:
| The main Redmond campus was shared with other tech companies
| originally.
|
| Microsoft grew outwards from the original 4, then 6,
| buildings. I guess they didn't think it'd be worthwhile to
| rename the buildings once they expanded beyond 4 or 6.
| RyJones wrote:
| 116/117/118/119 were just like that: rotations and reflections
| of each other. So confusing!
| abeyer wrote:
| The blog post is right that the double x-wings were the worst.
| I _never_ got the hang of 9 the whole time I sat there.
| ThrowawayB7 wrote:
| Another exasperating thing is that the signs on the wall that
| were supposed to provide directions by listing which office
| number range was down which direction were somehow of no help
| whatsoever. I'd be looking for office number xxx or whatever
| and following the signs and somehow they'd never take me to
| the right hallway. People can smirk and say "skill issue" if
| they want but I swear it's true. Judging by the number of
| other people who had problems navigating those buildings, I
| wasn't alone.
| CurtHagenlocher wrote:
| Similarly, buildings 40 and 41 were (at least pre-remodel)
| roughly mirror images of each other. Roughly a week after
| moving from 41 to 40 -- long enough to start navigating based
| on "caveman memory" but not long enough to override a year's
| worth of previous memories -- I accidentally went into the
| women's restroom instead of the men's because they too were
| mirrored.
| brantonb wrote:
| I definitely went into the wrong restroom a couple of times
| after an office move to the opposite side of building 9.
| avidiax wrote:
| Not much I miss about working at Microsoft, except that everyone
| had an office, and if you had even a couple of years of
| seniority, you had that office to yourself. The window offices
| required 5 years' seniority when I joined, and when I had 5
| years' seniority, window offices required 10 years' seniority...
|
| Even Microsoft has gone open office now, though.
| glimshe wrote:
| When I joined even college hires had an office. I miss old
| Microsoft badly.
| Rodeoclash wrote:
| This is my dream office setup - small pods of developers where
| you can close the door if you need to focus. Kit the room out how
| you like it.
| wenc wrote:
| Especially useful for phone calls -- don't need to hunt for an
| empty phone booth or book a room.
|
| I used to have my own office working for an older industrial
| company. Now that I work for a tech company, it's all open
| concept. I have no problem focusing, but taking calls,
| especially private ones, is a pain.
| michaelcampbell wrote:
| "Private personal space + collaboration friendly areas to be
| available as needed" has been the recommendation of basically
| every study I've seen on how to maximize software developer
| productivity.
|
| But bean counters kill that idea right quick.
| jwoglom wrote:
| I love that the black trash cans say "Microsoft" on them, for
| some reason.
| dhx wrote:
| What was the need for reinforced (wire mesh) internal glazing?
| avidiax wrote:
| The doors had locks (at least if you had a need for one), so I
| suppose this is simple security. Not that you can't hop the
| drop ceiling or just go through the drywall with less noise and
| mess.
| toast0 wrote:
| Possibly for fire rating. Wire mesh glass was common on fire
| rated doors to stairways and such, although there's other ways
| to accomplish that now.
|
| Edit: I had some trouble with the site, but figured it out
| enough to see that the offices have big doors, and then a
| window next to them that's mesh glass. Some of the doors have
| fire door tags (although you can't read them, and I only found
| one), and most don't. I suspect there was a code requirement
| for some of the offices to have fire rated construction, thus
| the fire door, and then you need the window and the drywall
| also fire rated. Other offices probably didn't need that, but
| maybe they used the same glass for everything for consistency.
|
| But, I'm not an architect or an appropriate engineer, my spouse
| holds a bachelor's degree in architecture, so I've got some
| knowledge by osmosis.
| dhx wrote:
| Thanks. It seems such glazing was common in American 1970's
| era construction as a way to evenly distribute across the
| pane and into the frame the heat from a fire on one side of
| the window. This extends the time before the glass shatters,
| which once shattered allows flames/smoke through. It has
| commonly been misunderstood to be "stronger" glass, an
| overloaded term that might have some applicability to fire
| resistance, but has given people the wrong idea about impact
| resistance. Glazing with embedded wires is much less impact
| resistant whilst also posing additional safety risk to humans
| impacting the glass. When humans attempt to pull themselves
| out of glass they've impacted, the wires hold sharp glass
| shards in place causing even more severe injuries.[1]
|
| It looks like all adjoining offices on the exterior of the
| building are single fire zones, with stairwells at either end
| of each zone. Internal offices seem to be divided into fire
| zones too (e.g. 6x2 rooms as a single zone) with use of the
| odd internal slab-to-slab wall that would possibly be fire
| resistant.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6Lmwl7y-9M
| Aeolun wrote:
| When they still knew how to build offices...
| ThrowawayB7 wrote:
| That brings back memories. Seeing that all too familiar office
| layout, furniture, scribbled notes on whiteboards, and whatnot
| somehow evokes both homesickness and PTSD at the same time.
|
| The offices were nice though. Back in the early days, it didn't
| take that much seniority to get a single person office and a
| little more to get an office with a window.
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| The original Microsoft building is in Albuquerque. Maybe this is
| the first one in Washington?
|
| https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/historic-microsoft-plaqu...
| mynameisash wrote:
| The title is referring to the fact that the building shown is
| the original Building 3. It has since been demolished, and now
| there's a new Building 3.
| canucker2016 wrote:
| And there's finally a Building 7, which I guess could be a
| way to determine when an ex-ms employee worked at the main
| campus.
|
| see https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20080401-00/?p
| =22... and https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/2025040
| 1-00/?p=11...
| mattgrice wrote:
| No it is not, an earlier WA building (not necessarily the
| earliest) was across from the Burgermaster on SR520/Northup
| Way. I think they meant it's the original MS building 3. As far
| as I know there is no 'new' building 3.
| jamiem wrote:
| There's a new building 3 as part of the East campus
| redevelopment
|
| https://maps.app.goo.gl/o4fLxGArs6GAhxgE9
| Wistar wrote:
| The first in WA was directly adjacent to the Burgermaster on
| Northup. The next set of buildings was nearly directly across
| 520 to the south.
| jerpint wrote:
| I wonder how long we'll start seeing demos like this with just
| Gaussian splatting and seemless transitions / infinite
| exploration
| tomcam wrote:
| I worked in Building 2 and it was my best job ever. Loved every
| second of it. They knew the need for thinking time, hence
| individual offices. Buildings 1-8 were in a wooded area with
| trails threaded through the area. Gorgeous in any weather but
| especially snow days. Jogging there in the snow was gorgeous, and
| of course they had showers so you could change.
| dchest wrote:
| Nice: https://postimg.cc/BLTv558B
| buran77 wrote:
| For collectors and archivists out there, just in case you would
| like to keep a local copy of the walkthrough:
| https://github.com/rebane2001/matterport-dl
| mittermayr wrote:
| This triggers all kinds of feelings, I actually had a pretty good
| time working there. It's one of those things that rush by like a
| rollercoaster when it's all happening, and you can't really grab
| a hold of it all. What stays, many many years later, is nothing
| but random snapshot memories, like a JPEG that gets saved and
| recompressed over and over again for the rest of your life. So
| this actually refreshed those moments a bit, seeing it like this.
| Instantly worried I had forgotten where I parked my car, which
| happened all the time back then, when you'd jump from meetings
| between buildings. I keep hoping to be allowed some kind of walk-
| through again, maybe, if I ever get back up there.
| canucker2016 wrote:
| RE: Snack room/Kitchen on second floor (near the testing lab
| double room with yellow floor)
|
| The soda pop selection has been reduced since I was there.
|
| No multiple root beers, no orange/cream soda pop, no Fresca.
|
| Not a sign of Sprite! Crikey.
|
| Only Minute Maid Light Lemonade?! No regular version? Are the
| employees in this building on a diet?
|
| At least they got rid of the spicy V-8. They shouldn't decide
| drink availability at company meetings.
|
| Bloody hell.
| canucker2016 wrote:
| No 7-up either. Double bloody hell. DEI for soda pop!!!
| canucker2016 wrote:
| Blog post with a pic of typical MS soda pop fridges in the
| 90s/early 2000s -
| https://davidweiss.blogspot.com/2006/04/tour-of-
| microsofts-m...
| CurtHagenlocher wrote:
| These were taken between 2014 and 2018, because I seem to recall
| that the "accent walls" were painted in fall of 2014 and the
| buildings were emptied for demolition in 2018.
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(page generated 2025-07-20 23:02 UTC)