George Clooney of IT: Dribbling disaster and damp disk warnings scare the life out of innocent user Welcome to another entry in The Register's On Call files, where we learn that the hilarious pranks of an IT joker can be enjoyed as much as millionaire actor George Clooney's "fun" leg-pulling. "Jim" returns once more to pages of On Call with a tale of poorly targeted japery and an unfunny practical joke. Is there any other …
I saw where that was going as soon as water was mentioned!
DRAIN was amusing in the office for a few minutes but, call me a spoilsport if you wish, should never have been unleashed on the insects* users.
*Back in the day it was reckoned there are only two levels in IT, Gods (the professionals) and Insects (everyone else).
I remember it well. Where I worked at the time the only people who wouldnt have either laughed or sighed and carried on as normal were the bosses with no IT experience hired to prevent progress in IT at the time.
Never play pranks on people who dont at least have a chance of working out what's going on and that you know well enough so you aren't surprised they are 3rd Dan in something that meant you spent ten minutes laid out cold because they were so stressed by what was happening finding out you did it bypasses all their control circuits as an 'Its OK he'll find it funny' mate of mine found out even though we'd trued to dissuade him on moral grounds. Must say we were delighted to find out the victim was a 3rd Dan.
The first time I tried to play Elite on a PC instead of a BBC, it was a 386SX25 and ran at about the right speed. The problem was the lack of a CGA card. It only had monochrome Hercules graphics. There was a program on the BBSs called HERC2CGA which emulated CGA with dithering and some games, including Elite, worked, probably because they used system calls and didn't bang the hardware. The only thing that stopped Elite being actually playable was the long persistence green phosphor. All on screen motion left fading green trails blurring the gameplay beyond usability.
As clock speeds rose it would have moved through dog-whistle and into bat communication.
The assumption of 18.2 clock ticks per second. Isn't it strange what useless information comes back to you after all these years?
Sometime in the mid-90s I found some old game floppies stuffed at the bottom of a packing crate, which hadn't seen the light of day for six or seven years. I had to dig through the spares cupboard at work to hook up a 5.25" drive one evening in order to copy them all to a zip drive and take that home. I was really looking forward to playing Leisure Suit Larry again, plus other old favourites, but few would work for one reason or another. Pacman in particular ran so fast that you could barely press a key before all the ghosts were on top of you.
This was typical of the (crap) PC developers at the time to assume that the game would be played on the exact same CPU that it was developed on. This was almost forgiveable seeing as many of the developers would have started developing on fixed specification 8 bit home computers but any system beyond these needed to have real timing considered. This wasn't limited to just PC developers of course, the early 16 bit computers were all (largely) fixed specification however the better developers quickly realised that some real clock timing was needed compared to just running at full speed frame refresh all the time.
Maybe I was weird but even on the C64 I timed things to the vertical sync (raster line interrrupts) to ensure smooth animation as not all IRQs were maskable and therefore some timing interruptions happened and that's before there were "too many" objects on the screen to worry about and do the tweening of the animation.
I highly recommend DOSBox. It's a FOSS DOS emulator that is extremely configurable. Among other things (like choosing sound card to emulate, or telling the software that the USB-to-serial dongle on COM5 is COM1), you can set the clock speed.
Works GREAT on old games, particularly when paired with DOSBox Game Launcher, a Java frontend for it. You can set up a "profile" for each game, with all the necessary settings, and double-click the game you want to play.
There were a whole bunch of files/programs like that. Every now and then some office wag would discover shareware and it'd be time to make the rounds doing cleanup again.
And then Walnut Creek CDROM started selling shovel-ware CDs with the complete contents of the likes of the Simtel MSDOS shareware archive. That would have been late '94 or early '95, about the same time I got completely out of end user support. Coincidence? You decide.
When I had too much time on my hands, I wrote a TSR (terminate and stay resident) program that intercepted the keyboard interrupt. The faster one typed, the more random errors in introduced. So it was not reproducable for the user/victim - typing slowly, everything looked okay.
Nasty, I know, but I was young and foolish then (and the victims were IT students like me so had a sporting chance...)
Many, many years ago BC - before computers - we had a placement student with us.
He was earmarked as a future Golden Bollox, who would end up in senior management no matter what. But apart from that, he was a decent guy who was also a good laugh and one of the boys (more or less, as long as it didn't affect his reputation with management). Gerry was his name.
One day, I decide to wind him up. So I produced a letter on internal memo paper and placed it on his desk. It said:
"Dear Mr [xxxxxxxx]
"It has come to our attention that when you attended for your medical examination, we did not collect a urine sample.
"Could you please fill the bottle provided and return it to the Central Surgery as soon as possible"
I duplicated the original letter, and subsequent copies of it, multiple times to give it that old, 'we send this out regularly' feel, with all the noise that photocopiers introduced, and placed it alongside a 2.5L (4.5 pint) Winchester bottle.
The problem was that he phoned the surgery to ask if he needed to fill the whole bottle, and the surgery turned out not to have the same wicked sense of humour I was under the impression that I had.
I started to shit myself, and phoned them up to apologise for the prank. They were quite good about it, but said it was wasting their time because it was the third time it had happened in the last month.
or the fallout may not be what you wish for.....
Also sometimes good practice to prime those around the victim so they can (a) support the joke and/or (b) won't turn on you if it goes wrong....
Did something similar back in the day with a fake virus checker that moved a person's files off their (3.5") floppy on to the HDD and displayed a message saying a virus had been detected. Panic ensued, until I "recovered" the files after a suitable time lapse and then explained the scam. Person selected was known to be both able to take a joke and deliver one, although even he did suffer a partial sense of humour failure briefly......
True.
I have a couple of good ones.
I used to work in a Lab, when I first started there I just did 1st 2nd line stuff, we also did the support for another lab about 1/2 mile away, I had a colleague that was based over there and when he was on leave I would go over to that lab and cover for him. Anyways he was on leave one Friday so over I went, the IT office was the usual affair a small little room full of general IT carp, it was a Friday and the World of science is pretty quiet on a Friday so me being bored I decided to set some new wallpaper on the PC, It was win95 on a Novell 4.11 network, so everyone just had the same desktop. I found a rather fitting non-PC picture of a nice lady stood stark bollox naked, except for a large pair of black kinky boots, on a desert road that disappeared into the background thumbing a lift. Hillarious I thought. Anyway Monday morning arrived my colleague turned up for work in said office to find a rather elderly boffin (he was a fellow at the lab so ancient!) and his equally eldery wife in his office waiting for him. Collegaue turns on PC logins in and up pops the hilarious naked woman desktop!! He told me I thought the old boy was going to have a heart attack!!
Another one which played out along unexpected lines happened at the same lab. It was my bosses 40, (circa 2000) he had already been at the lab for 20 years and another colleague had found an old security swipe card photo of him. He was white but liked his golf so he was quite a tanned chap and had, back in the day, a large bushy moustache, again hilarious. We had an open access room full of about half a dozen PC's that boffins and visitors who didn't have a PC could pop in and use. I thought it would be nice to set the default wallpaper of the PC's to the picture from my bosses swipe card, so any users logingjing in would have a nice jolly picture as the wallpaper! Anyway I set them all up the day before the bosses b'day before I went home The lab was built mid 70's and back then had a PdP in the "server" room and the open access room was back then the "terminal" room where there would have been some terminals for the operators use. Both the terminal room and server room had large, several metre long windows so you could look in to the rooms. Our office was just across the corridor from the terminal room so I kept looking out and saw some users sat there with the desktop wallpaper of my boss grining out, hilarious! I went off around the building for a while and returning to my office mid morning happened to glance in thought the window of the terminal room to see the room full of about 10 people all looking the same way in the room where there about 2m sq projected on the wall was my bosses face grining out, they were having a training course with an external traininer and she had hooked up a projector to one of the PC's to run the training from!!!!!!
My first proper job in IT was as a field engineer working on ancient Control Data machines at a large government site. One machine was a CDC3600, Seymore Crays first super computer circa 1965. Looking through the manuals it was found that an interrupt could start the machine from the stopped state (yes, mainframes of that era had a Stop key that brought the whole machine to a halt). So a little machine language program was written that set up a timer interrupt, but then kept resetting the timer in a tight loop. This was left running at the end of a maintenance period, the operator came along and, seeing that the machine was running hit the stop key to load the OS. The console typewriter immediately printed "F*ck off I'm busy" and the machine started again. After a few tries, he came to the engineers shack to complain.
Joke done time to end it. Unfortunately hitting Master Clear or Stop (or any other key) had no effect. Time to panic! As the machine had core memory, even switching it off wasn't going to help. Eventually we found that holding Stop and Master Clear down together for 5 seconds or so stopped the monster. Time to retreat to the shack and change the underwear.
Some victims deserve it but others don't.
When we were developing time sharing on a GE-635 the central computer (about the size of a pair of bunk beds) had lots of switches on the control panel. One GE person kept writing down the position of all of the switches (with no clue as to what they did). So every time the field engineer or me etc. walked by the computer we would randomly flip a bunch of switches that weren't doing anything at the time. Our GE person was going crazy until one day we were trying to track down an intermittent hardware bug so we installed another switch to enable some diagnostic function. Our GE person had a cow when he saw it especially because everyone gave a different explanation for the switch.
In research we hired co-ops to help with some of the work. One day, my co-op came in and said that there was something wrong with her X terminal. I went and looked and noticed a small box in the upper left hand corner. Every 30 seconds a flying saucer would emerge from the base and attempt to capture the cursor. You could evade the flying saucer but only if you let it drag the cursor back to its base would you be allowed to resume normal operations for another 30 seconds. I suppressed a laugh and looked around to se some other smirking co-ops. So I said to them, "OK, turn it off - you've had your fun."
X wasn't very secure in those days.
X wasn't very secure in those days.
An audio file with Meg Ryan explaining things to Billy Crystall in a diner was frequently sent with rsh between Sun workstations. Bonus if the recording started asynchronously on an unsuspecting user right after some code finished running or a piece of data was processed.
Popular some 30 years ago - we all were young(er).
Years ago, I re-purposed an old sparc station as a snort IDS. Being on a switched network, and not tapped into any kind of ideal port, it didn't really do anything useful of course. Except for the one day it did detect an unwanted intrusion - the pipe above it burst and electrocuted it.
Alerting left a little to be desired tho - I only found out when I came in to find the console was unreachable.
One of my work colleagues took that to the next level with just about every error message screen from the last 30+ years.
Think Amiga 'Guru meditation', Macintosh 'dead mac', Amstrad CPC 'load errors' etc etc.
Most users though would have been thoroughly confused by just the variety of errors, us devs though usual go misty eyed...
A colleague had the BSOD screensaver running on his own PC at work. Not as a practical joke, he just liked it. He also had one of the few machines with a CD writer.
One day when he was out, someone else was trying to use it to write customer data to a CD. I eventually noticed that he'd been doing a lot of swearing for the last couple of hours. On asking what was wrong, he said he'd spent the morning trying to write to CDs, but the machine kept crashing half way through.
"Is it crashing, or is it just the screensaver?" I asked.
He was not amused.
Not really a joke along the same lines, but my home PC has the C64 start screen as a background. Of course, to end a teams call, I have to back out from RDP to my local computer. Several times when I have been screen sharing, I have heard somebody laughing just as the call ends and then gotten a message saying "Sorry, I was laughing at your background".
The first time that I saw the BSOD screensaver was on the Microsoft NT 4 roadshow. The two Microsoft guys were doing a demo of the new NT 4 using a massive projector screen (it was in a cinema IIRC) when it BSOD'd on a screen 20ft high.
Everyone laughed then the Microsoft guys grinned and moved the mouse and NT sprang back into life. They got a round of applause.
Back in the 1990s, had a guy doing a Powerpoint presentation and talking about computer errors, when he changes slides just in time for a BSOD. He turns to the IT guy with a long-suffering look and says, "What the hell, Bob?" Bob's looking slightly panicked and starting to get up to check the system, when John hits the clicker again and gets the next slide.
John had put a BSOD into his presentation for effect.
Several of us were chuckling evilly at that point because it was actually our idea, enthusiastically adopted.
I used to have a little com file that would put pretty realistic flames across the bottom of a dos 6.2 screen, looked pretty good with a whole classroom doing it.
Also there was a little duracell style bunny that could be set up to scurry sequentially across Apple mac screens and make its way round the room , that always amused the students.
People wrote those for shits and giggles , ive seen far less impressive software milking tons cash from the NHS for next to nothing - like a peer to peer desktop alert button ... you know who you are!
One of my favourite display hacks was for Windows in the early 2000s. It was a cat that would walk across the top edge of whatever windows you had open, as though the screen windows' frames were physical window frames it could stand on. As I recall, it did cat things -- stop, sit down, wash itself; maybe peer over at the window's contents -- then stand up and go on its way.
Brilliant!
> Are you sure it wasn't the Bonzi Buddy?
OP seems to be describing neko, also available as oneko and xneko. Depending on implementation or command line options, this is a cat that can either follow the mouse pointer (alternative "mouse" pointer graphic included) or wander around the window you were focusing on. You could run several of these and have (for example) a cat chasing your mouse, a dog chasing the cat, and a girl chasing the dog.
I liked the idea of making the cat a bit more playful by extending the state machine but never got around to writing that much of it (I kept the skeleton code to build X11 apps on top of, though).
I also vaguely remember one with a red headed girl on a space hopper that started to look NSFW if the space hopper was off screen (--> may have been the point).
Collegue leaves station unattended:
dash to pc
Print screen
win+r , mspaint
paste
set as wallpaper
optional extras:
rotate pic 180 (extra points for flipping screen at same time with nvidea shortcut: L-ALT + -> )
draw cock and balls on pic
..this should take no more than about 20 seconds
We used to do this sort of thing (minus the crude drawing) when someone left a machine unlocked, as a gentle reminder to lock them when stepping away. Once, when a colleague left their computer unlocked one too many times, I kept it awake long enough to find an audio recording of a sheep bleating, pull it into Sound Recorder, drastically amp up the volume, transfer it to his machine, and set it as his incoming email sound. First time he received an email, there was stunned silence, then he burst out laughing, having figured out what happened. He liked it, though, and kept it.
Fast forward a couple months. He was giving a safety presentation to about 40 people (myself included), with his machine hooked up to the projector (and thus to the room speakers). In the middle of his presentation, he received an email. (Not me, really. Just a normal, routine message.) Turns out the room speakers were turned way up. Everybody jumped - it was LOUD. He then laughed, and said "Now that you're all awake..." and continued like nothing had happened. (Pretty sure he changed it after that.)
Early versions of SunOS didn't protect the audio device, anyone could write to it. Knowing that someone on the floor below had recently taken delivery of a new system a colleague used rcp to remotely copy an audio file of the loud bit of the Hallelujah chorus, the "Ha-le-lu-ja!" part, to /dev/audio on her system.
An hour or so later the user came looking for him. She had at that very moment been doing a demo of the new system to one of our directors, and exactly as it finished (successfully) it burst into celebratory cheering. Apparently she just looked at it, stunned, and said "It's never done that before".
There was also the cron job that emitted a "Cuckoo-Cuckoo" the appropriate number of times on the hour. By lunchtime the unlucky system was being threatened with a hammer by its office mates.
Talking of Hallelujah...
My son's school had a fancy dress day for charity, my son decided he would go as a well known figure, fortunately someone else decided to go as King Leonidas.
He strolls in late to RE, to hear a adherent of another religion proclaim he doesn't believe in Jesus Christ or the second coming & is reduced to a stunned silence with obligatory double take at my son's entrance.
yes but personalities can be deceptive!
we had a lady from HR out on maternity leave, her temp replacement was, how can I describe her, a bit rough! Came across as a rough pubs barmaid, her FB page had a picture of her drapped across a nissan navaro bonnet dressed in leather, so you get the kind of idea. She was in the reception being shown how to use the switchboard, the lady showing her was the receptionist and a good friend and a good laugh. Anyway temp said she was being trained on the switchboard but no one had rung yet, No probs said I, thinking she would be up for a laugh and we quite often played prank call jokes on reception I dashed up to my office and phoned down to reception. Temp answered, "hello this is..............." Me "show us your tits" in a comedy Peter Kay style voice "go on show us your tits" anyway later that day called in to the the managers office as the rough old barmaid had put a complaint in, lucky the HR manager was just as un-PC as we were so she just laughed about it and told me to be more careful!
Prank calls were a favourite of mine and a colleague normally to reception. We had a particular user who had a very distinctive Irish accent which was quite easy to copy, so we would quite often phone reception pretending to be this person and ask random stupid questions. We did this loads until the usual receptionist cottoned on. Then one day the REAL person phoned reception and asked for something and got the reply "yeah, yeah, yeah very funny which one of you two is it?" " I can assure you this IS said person!"
People often have different expectations for how they will be treated in a corporate environment than in their personal lives. Especially on their first day. You should probably default to not asking the women at work to show you their tits. That is also a good rule for real life.
We had a guy who had a pirated version of a golf-game on his work PC.
When we updated all the equipment (1990's) we were instructed not to include FDDs on the new machines. They weren't necessary and as the external-virus threat was growing to be a pain it was a good step forward.
This guy was no simple 'user'. He had installed software before. He managed re-load his work PC surreptitiously with the wonderful game which he could then enjoy at any time as his monitor could not be observed from others in the room, desks faced inwards to ease internal co-operation.
You can imagine his reaction when 'golf.exe' (or whatever) brought up a warning screen, loud beep-beep-beep, virus, virus, virus etc. We had deleted his game and replaced it with a simple warning programme.
It didn't happen again. He wasn't very good at his primary task (sales), not sure about golf. He moved on.
Oh I remember a call from a customer saying there was some urgent data that they had they needed to recover from a backup.
Oh good, I thought. They're diligently backing things up and remembered to ask how to do this when things went wrong.
After an hour or two of the backups not working, I realised it was from a later version of DOS. From someone else's PC. And the "urgent data" was a cracked version of a flight simulator their friend had got hold of somehow.
I didn't rat him out to his own boss but quietly explained this was a bit illegal and probably nut the sort of thing he ought to be doing with a company PC...
In a previous job users used to share games using a network folder, although they'd been warned not to run any unapproved software.
After several attempts to stop them, deleting multiple folders only for them to re share the games, someone in IT decided to play a different game and started replacing the little .exe files for something that would make the culprit really conspicuous.
The one got the most red-faces was one that turned the volume to the max and played "Hey! I'm watching porn over here!" It also drew a lot of laughter :)
Back in 80s we wrote a number of programs to do "amusing" things to the screens of Sun workstations. One had a vaguely ant-like creature that would run across the screen and steal a letter. A more subtle one would displace letters up or down by one pixel - if you were actively working you probably wouldn't notice anything as the screen would get refreshed, but if you weren't doing anything after a while all the lines of text would become wavy.
I seem to remember back in the green screen days of word processing where I worked, we had a screen saver called DRIP on our Wang machines. When it timed in, it would copy whatever was on the screen at the time (like a very important document) and display it, before random individual letters would drop out of position and collect across the bottom of the screen. Caused much panic amongst the typists, who had only recently transferred from typewriters to word processors, and much hilarity amongst the IT "Professionals" (as we called ourselves), when called to save the day. A simple tap on the spacebar was all it took to "recover" the intact document.
Around 1986 I put together a stationary "screensaver" for Sun that made the screen look like it had a couple of bullet holes in it. I sometimes deployed in on systems where the user (engineer) had the screensaver set to random. Quite realistic on a Trinitron ... realistic enough to draw many a scream of "What the FUCK‽‽‽‽" from people who should know better.
We used to have an in-house CAD system that was launched from a shell script on our Sun network. The program was rather flaky, and crashed frequently. Some comedian <cough> modified the launch script to detect a crash exit, and then play a random sound clip from a small selection (bomb exploding, toilet flushing etc.). My favourite was a clip from Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds CD "And suddenly, the lid fell off".
The black and white Sun displays simply put their video memory into the normal address space so you could write directly to it. I wrote an assembler program that would run Conway's Game of Life on the existing contents. On a Sun 2 it ran at about 10 generations a second and looked quite spectacular when run on some unsuspecting victim's screen.
Back in the day (mid 1980s), I hacked the underlying code for some networking kit we were shipping to add a command ... "fire".
The entire command string was "set fire <node> <card number>". This raised voltage on an otherwise unused trace on the backplane, which in turn set off a squib.
I called TheBoss into my lab to tell him that I had discovered something that didn't look right ... He came down and I typed in "set fire node 3 card 1". This produced the nice ::crack:: and puff of smoke. The Boss looked startled, and quickly typed in "set fire node 1 card 5", which produced the same satisfying crack & smoke. Followed by node 4 card 2, same result.
Then he turned & grinned at me and said "jake, you BASTARD! ... he always was a quick study. Best boss I ever had.
Needless to say, I had the full compliment of cards on all 8 nodes on the test network wired. No, we were airgapped, and the code didn't make it out into the wild.
I concur with the above folks who suggest only playing this kind of game with people who not only get the joke, but also are fully equipped and willing to respond in kind. Makes life a trifle more ... interesting.
We did used to prank each other, the most memorable because it took a while for him to get to the bottom of it was introducing a hack to the command line interpreter which checked the username of the person logged in and introducing a delay in transmitting commands from the keyboard buffer to the command line, to make this more annoying we hard coded the username but set up a register to hold the delay. We were installing a very large new mainframe so with just 3 of was working to configure it response times were instantaneous, unless your name was Andy. Needless to say we started off with a very small lag and gradually increased it to the point where he was trying different pcs and network connections to try and get around the lag. we were very sympathetic and gave him several 'tips' on what to check out. After a couple of days he went very quiet fora couple of hours before leaping up shouting you Ba**ards. My other colleague and nearly wet ourselves as he was the 'calm one' on the team.
Some of you will remember having 2B+D/30B+D ISDN, Kilostream or Megastream circuits, or if you were really lucky something beginning with STM... Your ISDN came from the local telephone exchange, which is where I and my test & development colleagues came in. We had our own System-X switch for testing (GC25, if anyone remembers it).... which had an alarm panel with lights and a rather annoying buzzer.
Team boss was a good manager, but not so hot on controlling the shared switch, which gave us some issues sometimes (He'd initiate a 'rollback' and trash hours of our work).
Our solution (Well, mine!) was to adjust the Attachmate KEA! terminal emulator macros we used extensively so that, if your windows user name was <AccountOfBoss>, you could still log in but your terminal session would silently issue the TEEXA; command ('Test Exchange Alarms') and set off the lights and the buzzer..
Its was handy to be alerted about the boss being on the switch, and after a while he gave up logging in because of the noise! Result!
Beer is for anyone from A&TN who remembers GC{xx}, Vision ISP, CMUX(+ and 2), SMA Muxes, MD202, RENACE, XCD5000 and all the other kit I/we played with....fun times. Bonus for anyone who can remember what a TU1.2 is:-)
If Neil reads this, I still have the audio file we played to KR over his SDTA deskphone :-)
During a helpdesk stint, I took a call from a lady on a remote site who hesitantly enquired if the new Compaq PC she had recently been issued was water cooled, because hers had sprung a leak and the monitor was dripping onto her desk...
I told her to get away from her desk without touching anything, while I summoned the site facilities crew. Turns out that her open-plan office had all the power sockets in the ceiling, with metal poles dropping down to the desks, to which the cables were tied. The aircon unit in the ceiling next to her desk had actually sprung a leak and the water had somehow found its way to her cable support, dribbled down the cable and formed a pool around the PC.
... but I once (a looong time ago) worked on a small software project with a friend who'd lose his nerve so easily I had to find a way to prevent him from rm -rf the whole dev tree if something didn't compile. So after giving up on explaining him how his development method would essentially mean we might never finish the project, I resorted to locking him off the root user and randomly aliasing/renaming rm and other potentially dangerous commands before he punched in. He cursed and bitched like a sailor for a couple of days, but in the end he accepted his inability to delete stuff.
I remember working for a bank the porn mail that went round
The one where someone clicked something and it basically unmuted sound, set the volume to max and screaming "THERE'S SOMEBODY WATCHING PORN OVER HERE!!!" whilst flashing the screen red & orange or something.
The look of horror on peoples faces staring at the screen,
Much hilarity hearing that richoting at round a floor of 600 IT people in a bank at various distances!
I wasn't responsbible for that one fortunately!
Thankfully didn't encounter this one in person, but some particularly sociopathic BOFH posted on a forum I frequent gloating about a "prank" he'd played on a newbie PFY. He'd gone into the office after hours and replace the SATA cable on the PFY's machine with a known bad cable, then left the PFY struggling with it the entire day the next day, before swapping it back after hours again. Needless to say nobody was amused with this idiot's story, I think he may even have gotten a temporary ban for it.
Personally I'll just stick to swapping desktop backgrounds to picardía faces when people leave their machines unlocked.
In our office we had an ICL DRS-30 concurrent CP/M system with about 8 terminals. As a joke I wrote an assembler program to run on boot , which checked the system date. Only if it was 1st April would it do anything - it would pop up a message saying "Are you sure you wish to format the system drive?" - no matter what key you pressed, it would the display a progress bar, saying "Deleting...." and then, when it reached 100%, it played the Monty Python theme tune.
I thought it was hilarious - others didn't!
Art wondered "a genuine part of Version 6 Unix or a local hack"?
That, my friend, was straight out of Berkeley, pre- BSD (but not by much, a month or two). It was originally a shell script, later re-written in C. There was most likely a cron job to activate it on April 1st at your location. (In the early AM, copied into a directory on your $PATH ahead of wherever your system kept the actual date, and then nuked at noon).
This kind of thing spread like wildfire over the early ARPANet.
I remember supporting an IT sales team back in the 90s. Both the tech manager and I used to get in before the team arrived so we could get set for the day. (i.e. set up the coffee machine, and empty the first jug before the sales team arrived.)
Unbeknownst to me, the Tech Manager had installed a something "extra" on the head of sales PC - because, well he was head of sales and ALWAYS tinkering where he shouldn't and visiting websites he shouldn't after hours.
HoS arrived, sat down and booted his PC and shouted out loud that there was a problem. We both rushed to his desk and there, in the middle of the screen was a window headed by "Deleting" and then a rapidly scrolling list of files on his PC that it was deleting.
Boy, was the HoS distraught. All his hard work (and some sus downloads) were not only disappearing before his very eyes but eyes other than his were able to see some of the product of his after hours "work"
Many different keystrokes later, none of which failed to halt this desecration, he asked "but it's OK, though, isn't it, because it's all backed up" and the Tec manager said he hoped so, but sometimes when users tinkered with their PCs they upset the delicate link between PC, server and back-up
Finally, it came to light that the Tech Support Mgr had installed a simple script that just listed all the files on the HoS PC so nothing was deleted.
It did stop the HoS from tinkering though and after hours dalliances came to an end........for a while
Replacing some keys from the mark's keyboard was always fun.
Switching the 1-2-3 keys for the 7-8-9 ones was a particular favourite.
Switching some lesser used symbol keys was also a good one, but took usually longer to get noticed - you could easily miss the moment they'd realise they'd been pranked
A tiny little Windows .exe file that would produce a cartoon sheep near the top of the screen. If the sheep appeared on the top edge of a window frame (like the File Manager or a word processing document for example) then the sheep would slowly progress along the frame grazing on digital grass. Until it reached the edge & fell off, at which point it would bleat in surprise & terror. Until it either hit the top of another frame to repeat the cycle, or fell off the screen entirely to reappear somewhere at the top again.
This was amusing if launched in the single digit instances, annoying if launched in the tens, & would bring a server to it's knees if spawned by the hundreds.
The sales manager of my employer at the time had started his life as a sheep rancher & still kept a few on his home acreage, so I thought he might appreciate the joke.
Day one saw a single instance & he was surprised and delighted. Day two saw a second spawned; he was surprised, delighted, & even turned the sound up to laugh at the surprised "BAAAA!" as they fell off the frames. By day forty-two he was no longer amused as his computer was taking far too long to do even simple tasks. At about the six month mark he was probably about ready to throw his computer off the roof.
I walked by, admired the sheep, & asked him why he no longer enjoyed them. He told me in no uncertain terms he was sick & fekkin tired of bloody sheep. I told him to go to lunch & I'd see what I could do to rid his computer of the infestation. He was only all too happy to hit the pub to calm down.
I uninstalled all the copies, removed the script that cloned the .exe file & renamed it so to avoid obvious detection, and verified that his computer was back as it should be.
He comes back, turns his system on, & cries out in gratitude that I'm a bloody genius. He grabs me, drags me back across the street, & stands me a pint in gratitude. At which point I felt honour bound to explain my prank. I figured he'd kick my arse back to the office & deliver my head to the HR department. Instead he slaps me on the back & praises me for a prank well done.
"But if you do it again, mind, I'll chuck yer arse off the roof to act as a cushion for the computer I'll send down next, Mkay?"
I agreed not to do it (to him) again, clinked in toast, & enjoyed my pint.
Of course I should have known it was all too good to be true.
One of my coworkers found the original .exe, copied it to their own computer, and used it to infect the main server. A task set to spawn a new copy every five seconds until the task was killed. By which time there were *thousands* of sheep infesting the server screens & the machines unable to do much of anything at all. And whom had just admitted to having pulled that prank on the sales guy? Whom got blamed for the server prank? Yeah... Sigh.
I was frog marched into the server room & told by the regional VP to "fix yer shit or clean out yer desk". Since I knew the exact file size of the executable it was a simple task to do a global DIR to find them, move them to a temp folder, & make sure the server task manager no longer spawned fresh copies. Make sure no false posatives in the temp folder, delete the folder, & reboot. Prove to the VP that no more sheep would be grazing, try to explain that *I* hadn't done the server prank, but all that got was the VP making a very loud (Drill Sargent projecting bellow) announcement that "any more pranks gets the joker fired!"
I certainly didn't pull any further ones, and a Fiver found its way to my desk wrapped in an appollogy note "For the server stunt".
Still, I loved those little sheep. I just wish I could see to run them again & laugh at the baaa'ing little baa-aa-aa-astards. =-)
So I'm in Florida, the land of perpetual 100% humidity.
Several decades ago, I ordered a cellphone from the company that "serviced" my workplace.
Said phone was one of those tiny Samsung flip-phones with the little LCD on the front. It was packaged in one of those boxes where it was flipped open and "suspended" in clear plastic.
This is important, because I could easily see the little water indicator on the back, which was bright red.
I remember somehow confirming that meant "water damage" and I was VERY careful not to break the wrapper, and returned it as damaged. The phone company was extremely nonplussed.
While far more tame than some of the stories, I used to work with someone who would take every opportunity to pose as you on the internal instant messenger, or set up meeting invites for the entire department at 2am to discuss the weather if you walked away from your computer without locking it. Most times he got a little too greedy and got caught in the act, but sometimes a person might be gone for several minutes and he could thoroughly confuse people on the instant messenger.
How about a recent (ish) joke that was a lot of fun with my children... The Untitled Goose Game is a gem.
So is the Desktop Goose! https://samperson.itch.io/desktop-goose
Managed to get one of the kids asking why a goose was on their screen running off with the mouse! I have been tempted to load it on customers machines... ;-)
I promised them that I'd look into it when I finished work that day. Tee hee.
I've put it in a surreptitious folder on the NAS in case we decide to use it again...
Quite a few generations after the DRAIN.EXE shenanigans, we had an office analyst who insisted on using his iMac (Bondi Blue, of course) in the office instead of his company-issue pc. So naturally he had to be punished. I installed Uli's Moose on his Mac while he was on lunch break. At first he thought he was losing his mind and so did everyone he ran to, pointing at his iMac. By the time they ran over to see it the screen was back to normal. Poor old bastard was never the same after that. Zero computer skills (duh!) and all the personality of a wet noodle.
......I created a "different" version of the PDP-8 'Binary Loader' paper tape.
After intalling the 'Binary Loader'. attempting to install a binary tape caused the ASR33 Teletype (THOSE were the days) to burst into life and print out those fatal words: "HELP - LET ME OUT" followed by much chattering and EOL bell ringing.
DEC engineers loved it, but my boss unfortunately could only manage a sick smile and comment "It's not supposed to do that!"
I changed the default Windows sound for incoming email to an audio clip from the children's program Blue's Clues. It would sing the little song "We just got a letter! We just got a letter! Wonder who it's from!"
Back in the mid-80s when our manufacturing plant was run by rooms full of Vaxen, we were connected to them via DEC terminal servers, which had it's own prompt and commands. There was a send message command, and it was possible to send the terminal escape sequence to clear the entire screen ($[H$[J). Whatever the user was doing, their screen got blanked.
And further back, while in college, I heard of the April Fools prank some enterprising students played. On the Xerox Sigma-7 that we were running in the computer center, all error messages were contained in a keyed file. When an error occurred, the system looked up the text in the file based on the key and displayed whatever was there. They managed to switch the official error message file with one containing "custom" messages. The center staff was not amused.
"Moisture sensors that display messages on screens are, after all, a relatively recent thing. This hack well remembers taking a borked iPhone to a UK Apple Store and being told the thing had clearly got wet and he should not use it in the rain. In the UK."
As Louis Rossmann says on his repair videos. The pads, at least in iMacs are so easily changed to red (meaning water damage) even just my humidity in a room that they aren't reliable yet the Apple stores use it as an excuse not to repair and claim water damage.
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