3 Apr
2001
3 Apr
'01
2:06 a.m.
This brings to mind one of the old practical jokes,
which can no longer be
used on modern systems...
Whilst some of the park routines used to allow ESC to be pressed to contiue
using the drive, un parking it, others simply said 'Drive heads are parked -
you may now power down' and halted the system. This led to the possibility
of some evil soul ;-) putting PARK as the last statement in AUTOEXEC.BAT.
The other one which comes to mind is changing the DOS prompt to something
like 'FATAL Parity error - Contact support', many users would make no
attempt to do anything else with the system before calling for help ;-)
This has nothing to do with this other than being the most evil practical
joke I ever played.
A couple years back someone on this list posted an HP control sequence for
changing the READY message on HP printers. So I wrote a script that found
every printer on campus, changed the READY message to INSERT 5 CENTS, ran
the script on April Fools' day and sent a message to the campus announcement
echo saying that all printers now would require a five cents' per page charge
with charge accounts required from all offices (coin acceptors to be
installed that same day). I nearly got in trouble with the Financial VP but
it was a great joke! I still have some archived voice mail from people who
took the joke completely seriously :-)
Of course, when my boss got back and found billions of angry messages it
was the new Ice Age for some time afterwards ...
They still talk about that joke in the programmers' nest and the original
message I sent to the echo is now posted on the system admin's wall. :-)
--
----------------------------- personal page: http://www.armory.com/~spectre/ --
Cameron Kaiser, Point Loma Nazarene University * ckaiser(a)stockholm.ptloma.edu
-- Long live the Commodore 64 -- eight bits are enough! -----------------------