Dangerous
I believe it's called "Dicing with death by a thousand cuts".
How delightful it is, dear reader, to meet with you once again on the confessional couch we call Who, Me? upon which Reg readers unburden themselves by sharing tales of things they probably ought not to have done. This week, we again hear from semi-regular contributor and raconteur "Bernard" from rural Middle England. You may …
> That day he happened to be carrying a floppy containing software that mimicked a washing machine?
Sounds like DRAIN.COM to me - a joke program that claimed to have detected water in the floppy drive and initiated a "spin cycle" that involved torturing the floppy stepper motor a bit.
Disks with a selection of these hoax programs regularly did the rounds, as seen here previously.
I still think MacOS 7 had a great feature for those times when you wanted to be evil: you could record your own system "beep". And, multitasking being what it wasn't nothing would happen while the sound was playing. So if someone, just as a will example, recorded 30s of silence. What does the typical uses do when confronted with "I clicked and nothing happens"? That is right: click a few times more. And your loyal fruit then plays the selected system sound, once for each click, and does nothing else until it is done.
I tested it, determined that it (a) worked, but (b) was sufficiently evil that it was reserved for only the most deserving users, and thus never got used. Much like the brand new printer cable that due to some manufacturing error printed everything sent to it as text. Pages and pages of text when a short Word-file was printed.
Ahaha, love it. In yet more proof that Microsoft must have copied Mac OS wholesale, the Win3.1 and 95 sounds would lock up the system, or at least the shell, in the same way. I once DOS'd myself by making a full five-minute song the startup jingle, at full volume, before the desktop finally loaded. Anytime a sound played, there was no way to cancel once it started, except the big red button.
> DRAIN.COM to me - a joke program that claimed to have detected water in the floppy drive and initiated a "spin cycle" that involved torturing the floppy stepper motor a bit.
Yes, for sure. Had much sick fun with that.
I still have a copy here. Win7 declines to try to run it.
FWIW-- it didn't actually "torture the floppy stepper motor". It ran on machines with no floppy (I didn't know that for a long time). It didn't "wrrrrr" if the PC boot-beep speaker was unplugged or blown. It was just bit-boffing the PC mobo speaker.
Some YouTuber posted a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cigK4m0vW4M
You can find the program in odd corners with Google and "drain.com DOS". (Without the "DOS" I was getting sewer cleaners.)
> A lot of them fell foul of increasing clock speeds.
BABY.COM involved catching babies dropped out of a burning hospital. Tough at 4.77MHz and laughably impossible at 12MHz (splatsplatslatHONK).
I recall DRAIN.COM using good practice and working fine and on-pitch well into 80386-25MHz days.
I "fixed" a coworker's PC once in 1986 by adding a Lotus 1-2-3 auto-run macro to beep, pause 2 seconds, repeat.
A month later, when I turned on my PC, it "detected" moisture and started the spin cycle. My brain wasn't quite in gear yet, and my first thought was "Wow, what a neat feature!"
> FWIW-- it didn't actually "torture the floppy stepper motor". It ran on machines with no floppy (I didn't know that for a long time). It didn't "wrrrrr" if the PC boot-beep speaker was unplugged or blown. It was just bit-boffing the PC mobo speaker.
Ah, I thought it did (if possible) to give the impression of having an effect - the author of the earlier On Call article having done so too. Sadly my chances of double checking with my own copy went away when I got one of those circular motivation talismans during lockdown and walked a load of kit to the local WEEE bin.
("Tortured the floppy stepper motor a bit" was somebody else's phrase that I liked. They'd applied it to an Amiga "emulator" for DOS that they'd twigged couldn't possibly work without floppy images due to the 880K formatting of native physical media)
Have an upvote for finding the video.
Once, long ago, I was in way over my head, I didn't know the app in question at all, I told a PA to a D level that her computer needed to be shutdown* and unplugged for 10 minutes to drain the capacitors, I needed a few more minutes to read up on her App's error message. And was praying to the reboot gods for assistance too. When I returned to her desk, I found my boss clacking away on the keyboard, he looked up without missing a beat and said, "The capacitors are drained, and I've been able to correct the error." I could tell there was a smile under his beard somewhere...
*Shutdown as in shutdown any other questions I couldn't answer, she was the PA to a Director... I didn't want to look incompetent!
It's not quite as daft as it sounds.
The original PS/2 Model 50 would often blow the PSU if shut down and then restarted immediately. A minute or so was sufficient to avoid the problem but of course you always tell impatient users to wait longer than necessary, on the assumption that they will always try earlier than told.
Before Halon, there was carbon dioxide flooding. I was told that when the Manchester ATLAS console started smoking, it was quickly discovered that the operators could run, run very fast in fact, which nobody could believe was physically possible, given their normal rate of activity. This would have been around 1967.
One of my teaching jobs involved clipping round the ears kids attempting to destroy the computers they were on by flipping the power switch as fast as possible. There is ABSOLUTETLY *NO* other reason for flipping a switch as fast as possible other than attempted destruction.
"There is ABSOLUTETLY *NO* other reason for flipping a switch as fast as possible other than attempted destruction."
Not quite true...
Once (circa 2006) had a client report problems with their WinXP computer booting after they found their toddler pressing their "floor-mounted" desktop's power button every few seconds... The toddler loved to watch the flashing power and HDD lights during the power-up process...
Solution: put the desktop on the Desk Top :)
At least dealing with the unhappy toddler wasn't in my purview :)
The object isn't to attempt destruction ... the object is to chose the manufacturer who doesn't cut corners in power supply design. If they allow the on-off-on-off-on-bang option, who knows what other "shortcuts" they have taken to save money.
In other words, it's a final QA check before I purchase the system. It's hardly my fault that they didn't perform it at the factory.
In the 80s on some home-computers (possibly some models MSX?), switching it off and on again very quickly stopped execution of the otherwise unstoppable program, but left the memory intact.
It was an established trick to "debug" a game (otherwise known as "crack"), until the rise of hardware-based solutions that could trigger an interrupt, stopping execution without having to switch the computer off and on again.
I had a PC compatible desktop in the 80's and it was often prudent to shut it down and restart it prior to trying to load some other software. A colleague asked to use my PC and without thinking, just told her to turn it off and back on again first. BANG! Power supply unit burned out. I forgot to tell her to wait twenty seconds or more before turning it back on again.
Way back when I worked at HBOS, well, ComputerCentre, subcontracted, as is the nature, they had these awful Dell C610's which had an amazing design flaw.
The "little blue dot" human interface device, or, to give it's technical term with a completely straight face, nipple, on the keyboard had it's ribbon cable run over the primary ram slot before joining the motherboard. This ensured that after enough hard work, with the ram getting hot, then cool, then hot, then cool, enough times that the mouse would take itself on a jolly little wander around your screen; somewhat perturbing to the bean counters the devices were issued to.
Official fix from Dell was, you'll be surprised to hear, a brand new keyboard at a hundred and fifty pounds (plus vat) I thank you. The unofficial CC fix was to ask the user if they have ever in their life used, or had the inclination to use, the little blue dot on the keyboard to move the mouse? At which point they'd say no and four screws and a pair of snips later the cable was removed and the mouse was back to being compliant and well behaved.
We called these "nipple-ectomies" and I don't know why, but when explaining this to a user one day the words came out of my mouth "well, in solidarity, I'm going to have to take one of yours too", he just sat there, sort of stunned silence fell over what had previously been an upbeat and banter filled conversation. I never did repeat that jape on any further call outs.
One joke that did land though, maybe not with the user, was those lucky enough to have some aging Compaq desktops (well after Comapq had been resigned to the bin of HP purchases and guttings) were treat to what could only be surmised as attempts to summon a lesser demon. A fault with an IE6 update caused the audio driver to corrupt and then whenever IE was opened the machine started speaking in tongues, bidding it's ode to whichever nameless entity it was trying to resurrect.
The fix was straight forward enough, swap out the corrupted file for a known good, this could even be done over network and not require me to attend, however, as I was second line support and our contract stipulated I had to attend, I got a good walk around the office after technically closing twenty of these calls (before the keen eyed are like, why not the call centre? They were in-house, so we wouldn't get paid if they closed the call, and so far they hadn't worked out the simple fix).
Half way through my stack of call sheets I get to a floor and find an absolute a-hole berating a poor young lady over nothing (least nothing I could make out), poor love was physically cringing, it's a workplace, no matter what you've done, it can't call for that and I just knew, of course, the belligerent a-hole would be who I'm seeing, as it always is. Before I could intrude on the screaming fit he clocked me with a "ah, you're finally here, fix this shit" pointing to his pc (call log twenty minutes ago, btw), with out a word I walk over to his machine and popped my standard issue toolkit out my pocket and unzipped it.
Well, I say standard issue, there was one little swap I'd done, you see down the spine of the faux-leather bound tool kit was a plastic tube that I am, to this day, some two decades later, still to ascertain it's exact use, unless I'd nodded off in the induction where they mentioned we have to take urine samples as well as fix pcs. So, this useless tube had long since gone, and, as one of the senior engineers was a bit of a whovian, replaced with a childs toy sonic screwdriver, it even lit up and made the sounds.
Plucked from the spine of the toolkit, a flick of the wrist extends the sonic screwdriver and I run it up and down the side of the PC, giving it a little stare as a flourish (though I'm still confused as to why he always stares at something with no evident readout..) and let the user know "that should've done it, you can use your machine again". I'm fortunate looks can't actually kill, but it's fairly possible I may have been sucked in to one of the nostrils that flared so much if I was a step closer. Taking the silence as intended, I reassured him it was resolved, grabbed the mouse, opened IE and, nothing, not a bleep.
His face, forever seared in my mind, as I think I fundamentally broke something, deep inside. The rational part of his brain knowing full well my childs toy did nothing to fix his computer. Yet, evident to his eyes (well, ears) it was fixed with neary any other interaction. "Any other problems, just give us a call" I smile, turn, wink at his colleague and make my exit.
As it turns out, unbeknownst to I, the senior engineer was on the floor at the time, he corners me in the lift. "Never, ever do that again" he breaks "funny as hell, but never do that again, alright" with the widest grin. That sonic screwdriver's still in my toolkit (though, the one in the house, I don't think I'd be still living if I was on break-fix for two decades, the lure of cat5 cables and suspended sealing supports would've been just too appealing an escape from user queries...).
They do, I was issued with one of them on my last contract, first thing I did was to go into settings and disable it. The laptop had a perfectly good trackpad and I kept catching it whilst typing and sending the cursor into the opposite side of the screen.
I know some people love them but I can’t get on with them they go from moving the pointer a fraction of a mm to the other side of screen when you look at them and never found a happy medium
Regarding cable testers: some years back I was part of the few remaining staff that was winding down operations at a facility that once employed > 500 people. There were only about 5-6 of us across various departments, and most of us were down to part-time hours, so the buildings were kind of creepy in their semi-abandoned state.
One day, I walked in to find the IT admin looking somewhat like a cat that had just seen a cucumber (check out youtube if unfamiliar). The facility was in the process of being subdivided for rental, and (unknown to us) a new tenant was having some telecommunications equipment installed. Their vendor naturally went to tone out a pair on a 66 block for the equipment.
What they didn't know was that the pair they chose had been used for our PA system. That pair originated at the switchroom from a bespoke system that could provide either music (from the radio, a CD player, or a computer for morning calisthenic exercises), or paging from the phone system (the system would "duck" the music during pages). The pair was patched through to every building in the facility. At one or more places in each building, the pair fed a 70v speaker amplifier which drove ceiling tile mount speakers in the offices and horn style speakers on the factory floor.
The music had been turned off for months, and pages were extremely rare with the limited staff, so the system was easy to forget. Every amplifier was still powered up, though, so when the tracer tone hit the input, they faithfully blasted it over the speakers.
I had the 'wondering mouse pointer' on one of my old IBM (don't) Thinkpads. It used to drive me nuts on a hot afternoon, especially during MSWord smithing a document with cut and inadvertently paste. I thought it was something to do with the mouse itself. Never occurred to me that the nipple connection was to blame.
After all, as was noted in the documentary 'Red Dwarf'
Kryten: "My nipples don't work."
https://www.angelfire.com/stars3/bonita/reddwarf2.html
Also ex ComputerCentre contractor (Still have the old polo shirts & fleece for dirtier jobs) & also guilty of carrying a toy sonic as a torch & giving a PC or printer a "Sonic" after fixing it.
I later got a full size replica remote control of the Elevenths, kept the younger kids amused when I worked at a private school, I always meant to program it for the overhead projetors used in the classrooms.
I remember that program :o)
There’s probably a copy of it in one of the boxes of ancient floppy disks in my attic (I rarely throw anything away - a lesson from my dad who, when watching antique shows on TV often remarked “we had one of those - threw it out years ago”). A surprise treasure trove for my grandkids when they have to clear it out once I’m pushing up daisies…
Curtesy of my late Father-In-Law - 6 left Wellington Boots.
He would wear the right boot sole out digging in the garden, but would keep the left as it could be used to mend a split in the upper of the right boot. But of course, the right boot never lasted long enough to suffer from that!
2 weekends burning stuff in a very large bonfire (luckily his property extended outside of the boundary of the village, and the wind was in the right direction to take the smoke away) and an Articulated Lorry sized skip broke the back of what was kept in a very modest sized bungalow!
Unfortunately, I fear that my father is worse, and I don't have access to the very large skip any more!
When we had to clear out the belongings of my great uncle we had to tackle the sheds in the garden. We knew there were two, joined as one building split across the boundary with the next door cottage which he also owned. In the dense undergrowth we found another shed, then another, then ... There were 7 in all. His modus operandi was to fill a shed with mostly useless junk, then build another shed for the next load. Each shed was more ramshackle than the previous one. We could tell the time line of how they grew by the random things wrapped in newspapers that dated back to the 1950s. That took a load of time to clear out. Some of it was at least interesting junk, there was a 1940s BSA bicycle that had paraffin lamps with light restrictors from the second world war, a full set of coopering tools, my great granddad's tool chest from when he was an engineer in the merchant navy, and the local police were good enough to call an amnesty on the shotgun.
Sadly, I don't think I'm much better regarding old tech gear. All those routers from changing providers every two years in the last couple of decades will be useful sometime, won't they?
Yep, I remember it too..... 1988?
I was the student in a large public body and a few of us had a bit of a sense of humour.
There were 2 or 3 PC's in an office with 4 or 5 staff and I knew a colleague of mine was due to do some updates on them, whilst explaining the process to a couple of other engineers. So I installed the "washing machine" floppy on one of them, and made my exit for a "bathroom break" as they say.
Five or ten minutes later I wandered back towards the office, and to my horror, not only did I see my colleagues leaving the room, but also our departmental director, AND an important looking bloke in an impressive suit who I did not know. My colleague and head both gave me the most perturbed look when they passed, whilst the shiney suit man took no notice. Remember this was in the days when folks were often referred to by their surnames and a lot of high positions in public bodies were occupied by ex military types.
Going back into the office I was given the death look by the staff inside. "Oh god" I said, "what happened, and who was that other guy?" "Good job he has a sense of humour" I was told "and saw the funny side, but you are probably best not pulling that one again" Turns out he was the brand new head of HR........
For the rest of the day I thought my student placement was over and finished, and my colleagues took no prisoners in keeping me on edge. Turns out head of HR didn't know one end of a computer from the other (as was normal back then) but understood they were important and going to be a big thing, and that young nippers who understood them and could make them do things, even funny things, were the future.
Some weeks later I was formally introduced to him at a meeting to discuss student and graduate recruitment and forever afterwards was immediately known as the "washing machine man".
Nowadays I think a prank like that in front of an audience like that would be instant dismissal.
Happy Days. Was that really 35 years ago? Jings, I must be getting old.
Yes, happy days when it was not seen as incredibly risky and instant dismissal to acquire some random bit of software and install it on corporate PCs. There were viruses around then, but thankfully relatively rare and usually a bit less vicious than nowadays, although even then, AV was part of the toolkit.
Back in the US day when there was but one phone company, and whose equipment was sacrosanct -- couldn't buy your own phone -- ca 1955, there was this:
Get a friend whose voice is unknown to your neighbor/friend/victim to call and say. "This is [your local Bell company]. We will be flushing the lines in your neighborhood tomorrow. To avoid any possible inconvenience, please put a sponge under your phone or put it in a bucket."
Next day, it was time to visit the victim.
My favorite was an audio clip of a toilet flushing. In the Win3.1/Win3.5/Win 95 era, this clip could be set up to play when the system was shutdown1. Happily distributed the clip, and the instructions for connecting it to the shutdown, to all and sundry who wanted it at places I contracted it at. I remember one day at the end of a long an arduous week where at 4:55p, a long cacaphony of toilets flushing emanated from the rows of cubicles in my group.
1Come to think of it, one can probably still do that, although most company's IT dept's make it much harder to do that nowadays.
Shoot. That's how my PC sounds every time I install some mictosoft patch or "fix".
Actually, I once wrote a simple program that would shut itself down after running. The jist?
C:> Please enter your user name
C:> That is incorrect. Please try again
C:> Wrong again, bucko. Once more, please
C:> Good grief! Are you that big a klutz? Try again
C:> Oh, forget it. You're too dumb to use a computer Good bye
C:>
Windows was known for vague and misleading error messages. The desktop IT geek was dating a smoking hot redhead in the office. He proceeded to write a program that would toss up a vague error on the screen every few minutes, and it was installed on her PC. Relaunch on reboot. Told her to write down all the errors exactly. After around 50 errors a message popped up professing his affections for her.
It all worked out for the best. She proceeded to bestow her ample talents on a different target and the desktop geek had more time to work on his coding skillz.
Less of a jape and more of a "screw you" on the way out the door...
Did some repair work for a now defunct retailer. I was the primary Apple repair person for the entire chain, and was good enough at my job that my metrics were so far above the average, Apple literally accused me of having multiple people doing repairs under my account. The reality was, I just had about 100+ units in a big stockpile that had been piling up for months before I was hired, and then I also started handling customer units. Plus, after you've replaced a dozen or so MacBook Pro display panels, or logic boards, it gets to be pretty routine.
Another part of my secret was how an old Mac Pro (the big aluminum tower units) came in and I guess they had replaced the customer's unit at the store with a new one or something because I was allowed to keep that one and turn it into a workstation for my efforts. So, I turned it into a restore server, which I then paired with an old like 8-port switch and network cables I scrounged up. I created install images for each of the major versions of Mac OS X at the time, even updated them when a new 10.x.y release came out. Being a lot faster than using a DVD to restore systems, and letting me restore multiple systems at a time, only served to increase my productivity.
The relationship between this company and Apple had always been rocky at best, and it never helped that the company very deliberately set out to violate the terms of the contract with Apple. I don't mind saying now that I tipped Apple off to that one. I didn't outright say what was going on, but gave enough clues that the account rep could read between the lines. So, eventually, I could tell they were planning to give my scalp to Apple in the hopes of making them happy, even though the only part I ever had to play in any of the schemes at that company was to shut them down or take no part in them. My supervisor, who normally wouldn't shut up all day long, suddenly stopped talking to me, and new units coming in slowed down to practically nothing... Even caught the Director of that particular part of the company talking on the phone to someone while looking at a specific unit I had set on a shelf, making it pretty obvious they were talking to a AASP that happened to be a few blocks away.
It was around that time that I decided it would be a good time to nuke the restore images on that server and then slow walk the process of rebuilding them, knowing full well no one else there would have any clue how to do that. Sure enough, a day or two later the axe falls. So, no restore server, no password for the restore server even if anyone there had a clue how to create the images and set them up on the server, and this was around the time Apple stopped including restore media with new systems and switched to downloading everything over the Internet -- the management for this retailer, for reasons that seem to defy all logic, insisted upon using a cellular Internet connection, for a "store" located smack in the middle of a giant warehouse with a metal frame. You'd be lucky if you could get a single web page to load without it keeling over, forget a couple GB restore image. So, they were increasingly screwed the more systems coming in with 10.7 or later that came in. Pretty sure not too long after that Apple stopped doing business with the retailer, as did a lot of other OEMs and wholesalers, causing a slow and almost painful to watch demise of the chain over the next several years.
When working for a local authority, I accidently knocked on the door of the external auditor's office when trying to locate an office I hadn't been to before.
In revenge, to be honest I think I was the first friendly face he'd seen for a while, I got a twenty minute sales pitch on why I should consider taking up IT auditing!
Once installed a screen saver on a colleague’s pc that made the text on the screen appear to melt slowly and fall down the screen.
I pre-empted a little before she stepped away from her desk by asking a few times if anyone else smelled burning “possibly electrical“.
A little while later she she wandered off to get a file (real, paper based), came back and was shocked to see her monitor show what looked like her typed work collapsing in on itself and I told her it must be on fire inside.
She duly ran to the staff kitchen to get a jug of water and only when she was about to throw it over the monitor did I tell her what I’d done, mostly to avoid the risk of injury to her.
She was a bit of a gym bunny but the resulting painful punch to my arm was worth it