[inforoots] Internet April Fools Jokes

Tue Apr 3 13:01:21 PDT 2007

Probably the best April Fool that I was aware of occurred at Tymshare.
There were two separate ones that were memorable, and I'll leave it
up to you to decide which was "better".

The first joke had an important amount of planning and setup, as we were
geographically distant from the recipient.  In the 1980s, we had 5 data
centers, Cupertino, Dallas, Fremont, Houston and Valley Forge. My boss,
on a trip to the Dallas data center took a styrofoam cup that had coffee
in it and let it dry while lying on it's side.  He secretly placed it  
on top of
one of the memory bays for our DEC PDP-10s during his visit.  Our custom
operating system, TYMCOM-X used the console only for startup and
diagnostics, so any messages that were typed out were important for the
operations staff to record and deal with, often calling our OS support  
group
for anything they had never seen before.

On April 1st, he used a little program he had written to send output to  
the
console, to print out several warning messages, about memory problems
on the system in question.  Over time the messages became more and
more urgent, and more and more specific, finally pinpointing the  
specific
memory box in question as having a problem.  Eventually the message
indicated that something had dripped into the box and asked the  
operators
to have a Field Engineer check the top of the memory box, to look for  
the
source of the problem.  Of course, they found the cup with the dried
coffee stain and were so amazed with the diagnostic capability of the OS
to be able to find the problem and the source, and did all of this  
without
crashing.

Our offices were an aisle or two away from the IBM OS group so we had
access to console output from their systems as well as our own PDP-10s,
and this helped set the stage for the next joke.

The 2nd joke was also played on the staff in Dallas.  The center manager
was a stickler for rules and tried to be on top of everything, so he  
was a
prime subject.  The majority of systems in the center were IBM 360's and
so the skill set was geared for those systems, and the PDP-10s were
often considered an after-thought.  Using the same situation, where our
console output was only used during timesharing for diagnostic output,
and the same program as above for displaying messages on the console,
my boss sent a series of messages that made the system look like it had
a serious problem and needed to be rebooted, and then went through
an auto-shutdown and reboot.  This, in itself was odd, because operator
intervention was usually required.  The second part of this was that we
had a feature that would display a different user prompt depending on
what mode the user had set upon login, so that a user in PDP-10 mode
would see the normal dot (.) prompt, and a user in TYMIX mode would
see a dash (-) prompt.

During the "reboot" process, the messages that appeared on the console
were different than normal.  Instead of the TYMCOM-X startup messages
the console displayed the TYMCOM-360 startup messages that the
operators normally saw on the IBM mainframes.  At the appropriate  
places,
as the system displayed information about the hardware configuration,
number of disk and tape drives, there were some warning messages that
the staff had never seen before.  The system was complaining about 4  
extra
bits in the processor, and in the memory boxes.  (For those who don't  
know,
the PDP-10 data word has 36 bits, 4 more than the IBM system with 32  
bits).

The last part of this trick was to add a patch to the system to display  
a user
prompt that looked like a prompt the operator would get if they had  
logged
into the IBM system.  Of course, the patch was set to only display this  
prompt
for the data center operators and operations manager's login ID.  So,  
when
the operators brought this weird re-boot to the attention of the center
manager, he had to come out on the floor and look at the console  
himself.
He then ripped the console output off and took it back to his office  
where
he called my boss to tell him what he saw.  Simultaneously he logged  
into
the system and saw the IBM prompt, and thought that somehow the system
had actually gone down and came back up as one of the IBM servers.

He was on the phone with my boss for an hour and a half, describing
the events and what he had discovered so far.  Tymshare also ran a
custom operating system on the IBM systems called TYMCOM-360
which had similar commands for the operations staff, so it was not so
obvious which system you were on, other than the prompts.  My boss,
of course, played dumb, and strung this manager along for all he could.

The best part of this joke was that at the end of the system startup
messages, the last message, with an appropriate IBM numeric error
code said, "April Fool!".  Apparently the event was so unusual, and the
coincidental user prompt was so convincing that the PDP-10 had
actually shutdown and rebooted as an IBM server, the manager never
really read every line of the output.  Near the end of the 90 minute
call, my boss couldn't take it any longer, and had the center manager
read to him the error messages from the startup log, one by one.  He  
still
hadn't seen the last line until he read it aloud on the phone, at which  
point
my boss couldn't stop laughing.  I'm not sure if that manager ever  
forgave
us for pulling that prank.  My boss kept telling him that if he had  
just read
the entire output, he would have figured it out.  The center manager was
so convinced because of the user prompt, that he overlooked the obvious.

So, my vote for the best April Fool joke would have to be the 2nd one as
it was able to be played out for so long.

-Carl

On Apr 1, 2007, at 9:01 PM, Bill Selmeier wrote:

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> Google's great TiSP April Fool's Joke today, such a tradition on the  
> Internet, made me wonder what was the best Internet April Fool's Joke.  
> It you haven't see the Google joke go the the web search page,  
> www.google.com, and try their Beta test offer, before they take it  
> down.
>
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