The answer to this, friends, was actually given by Microsoft’s Windows chief Joe Belfiore at the Microsoft Build conference, through the t-shirt he wore. Belfiore’s shirt had a binary code laid out in the shape of the Windows logo. When you translate the code into plain language, the numbers 7, 8, 9 appear. Normally you know the numbers go seven, eight, nine in English. But because “eight” in English sounds close to “ate,” we get “seven ate nine.” In other words, “seven ate nine” — that’s the whole gag 😀 You can see the t-shirt Joe Belfiore wore at the presentation in the row below.