[inforoots] Internet April Fools Jokes

Tue Apr 3 15:23:17 PDT 2007

On Tue, 3 Apr 2007, Van Snyder 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.
>
> =======================================
> The $64 question is "How did you get all the paragraphs to line up
> exactly at the same margin without double-spacing even once?"
>
> Van Snyder

Exactly. . .that's how I manage to fool people into thinking the batch file
was an authentic IBM system job. . .of course, I loved the one about "Mouse
Balls" the best of all those. . . .

Michael

I actually sent the Mouse Balls files to people who didn't realize the joke
even after I prompted them a few times. . . .

;-)))

>
> On Tue, 2007-04-03 at 14:33 -0700, Michael Hart 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.
>>
>> =======================================
>>
>>
>> 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:
>>
>>> =======================================
>>>
>>> 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.
>>> =======================================
>>> 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.
>>>>
>>>> ************************************************************************
>>>> Bill Selmeier		voice  (408)655-3400
>>>> 4441 Six Forks Road 	Suite 106-136		   Raleigh, NC 27609
>>>> Internet Developer    http://www.inetdevgrp.org     bills at inetdevgrp.org
>>>> or RightNet, Inc.      http://www.right-net.com      bills at right-net.com
>>>>
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