[inforoots] Internet April Fools Jokes

[Michael Albaugh]

Probably the best April Fools joke I ever did (although clearly not the
best ever April Fools joke) was a follow-on. One year, I simply replaced
a co-worker's VT-100 with a Teletype, along with a note that a new
employee needed a terminal and until we could get one, we figured
that he, as a TECO user, could make do with hard-copy. This led
to a "don't take my terminal again" declaration so next year I didn't.
Instead, I burned an horizontally flipped alternate character set
into his character-generator ROM, and arranged for a fake login
prompt and following text to be printed right-to-left, with that
character set selected. This would be hard to take very far, but I
had left the message "Help,  I'm trapped in a Vax" (reversed, of
course) visible, and faked DIR and LOGOUT.

 Anyway, the poor soul _thought_ I'd actually swapped the wires
to his horizontal deflection coils, so he "fixed" them, only to be
surprised again once he got a real login. :-)

Since they weren't done on April 1st, I'll have to leave out the
"Blow up console printer solenoids from Fortran", "Skip to
Channel 13", and "Flashbulb in a DIP socket" pranks...

   Mike