[inforoots] Internet April Fools Jokes

[Michael Hart]

My Nomination For Best April Fool's Computer Joke


This one was done by substituting our own book floppy
into the victim's computer, then running the autoexec
without actually rebooting, so the computer was fine,
it just gave the strange kinds of IBM error messages,
probably something on the same thought process as the
previous mentioned note to which I am replying.

In this case we [in]judiciously copies IBM's lingo at
the time, along with their ASCII borders, beeps via a
CTRL-G imbedding, and various loops in a batch file I
took days and days to write.

The upshot of it all was to pretend to send the April
Fool computer into a diagnostics mode, completed with
various "1701" error messages and the like, then into
a variety of "Disk Tests" that would start with "OK",
then gradually appear to build up errors until a made
up limit of errors was reached.

This took several minutes, and thrashed the harddrive
appropriately, yielding "Bad Sector" reports, beeping
and all the appropriate mumbo-jumbo taken from my old
IBM dark blue Diagnostics Disks, Norton's etc.

Once the limit was reached, the "Operating System" in
question would declare the harddrive unusable, advise
the user to request an FRU/Field Replaceable Unit and
give them an 800 number to call.

Meanwhile by redirecting the output from the "dir" we
could give a very real listing of the "Bad Files" and
make it appear they were being deleted as corrupted--
with an accompanying beep and WARNING:  message every
time one was "deleted."

The prompt was overwritten at the very beginning with
a very official looking IBM Diagnostics Prompt saying
the user should not interrupt or interfere with these
ongoing maintenance processes, as data could be lost.

On and on, and on and on. . . .

Next time you are fact to face with a book floppy you
might think about this one. . .hee hee!


The Phantom


On Tue, 3 Apr 2007, Carl Baltrunas wrote:

> =======================================
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> Posts to inforoots at computerhistory.org is information known to or the 
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> USA.
> =======================================
> 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:
>
>> =======================================
>> 
>> Posts to inforoots at computerhistory.org is information known to or the 
>> opinions of the poster.  All posts to inforoots at computerhistory.org are 
>> archived.  By posting to this list you grant a license for use of this 
>> material to the Computer History Museum located in Mountain View, 
>> California, USA.
>> =======================================
>> 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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