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I saw where that was going as soon as water was mentioned!

DRAIN was amusing in the office for a few minutes but, call me a spoilsport if you wish, should never have been unleashed on the insects * users.

*Back in the day it was reckoned there are only two levels in IT, Gods (the professionals) and Insects (everyone else).

I remember it well. Where I worked at the time the only people who wouldnt have either laughed or sighed and carried on as normal were the bosses with no IT experience hired to prevent progress in IT at the time.

Never play pranks on people who dont at least have a chance of working out what's going on and that you know well enough so you aren't surprised they are 3rd Dan in something that meant you spent ten minutes laid out cold because they were so stressed by what was happening finding out you did it bypasses all their control circuits as an 'Its OK he'll find it funny' mate of mine found out even though we'd trued to dissuade him on moral grounds. Must say we were delighted to find out the victim was a 3rd Dan.

Was there anyone who was there then who doesn't remember it? The AT killed it IIRC because the audio was derived from the processor clock. As clock speeds rose it would have moved through dog-whistle and into bat communication.

Hence the so-called Turbo buttons that were actually Slow Down buttons to reduce clock speeds to XT levels. I recall quite a few programs that relied on the clock speed.

I used to use the slow down button for the hard bits in Price of Persia :D

I thought she was [1]Jordan , not Persia.?

Sorry, couldn't resist (and she's probably had a few hard bits in her)...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katie_Price

There were a whole bunch of files/programs like that. Every now and then some office wag would discover shareware and it'd be time to make the rounds doing cleanup again.

And then Walnut Creek CDROM started selling shovel-ware CDs with the complete contents of the likes of the Simtel MSDOS shareware archive. That would have been late '94 or early '95, about the same time I got completely out of end user support. Coincidence? You decide.

With the dinosaurs (users) possibly being on bonus for keystrokes per hour, the "clever sod" would have been strung up.

I remember with fear entering a 'data entry room' when it was silent and a 100 pairs of eyes following me to get the system back up

or the fallout may not be what you wish for.....

Also sometimes good practice to prime those around the victim so they can (a) support the joke and/or (b) won't turn on you if it goes wrong....

Did something similar back in the day with a fake virus checker that moved a person's files off their (3.5") floppy on to the HDD and displayed a message saying a virus had been detected. Panic ensued, until I "recovered" the files after a suitable time lapse and then explained the scam. Person selected was known to be both able to take a joke and deliver one, although even he did suffer a partial sense of humour failure briefly......

"Person selected was known to be both able to take a joke and deliver one"

Tell us about his revenge.

Years ago, I re-purposed an old sparc station as a snort IDS. Being on a switched network, and not tapped into any kind of ideal port, it didn't really do anything useful of course. Except for the one day it did detect an unwanted intrusion - the pipe above it burst and electrocuted it.

Alerting left a little to be desired tho - I only found out when I came in to find the console was unreachable.

Installing the BSOD screen saver was funny on your development colleagues' machines but unnecessary cruelty when it it landed on the users' desktop. The firm word of advice with clear boundary setting was exactly the right approach.

One of my work colleagues took that to the next level with just about every error message screen from the last 30+ years.

Think Amiga 'Guru meditation', Macintosh 'dead mac', Amstrad CPC 'load errors' etc etc.

Most users though would have been thoroughly confused by just the variety of errors, us devs though usual go misty eyed...

A colleague had the BSOD screensaver running on his own PC at work. Not as a practical joke, he just liked it. He also had one of the few machines with a CD writer.

One day when he was out, someone else was trying to use it to write customer data to a CD. I eventually noticed that he'd been doing a lot of swearing for the last couple of hours. On asking what was wrong, he said he'd spent the morning trying to write to CDs, but the machine kept crashing half way through.

"Is it crashing, or is it just the screensaver?" I asked.

He was not amused.

BSOD screen saver was fun until one of my coworkers saw it and helpfully shut down my PC.

I used to have a little com file that would put pretty realistic flames across the bottom of a dos 6.2 screen, looked pretty good with a whole classroom doing it.

Also there was a little duracell style bunny that could be set up to scurry sequentially across Apple mac screens and make its way round the room , that always amused the students.

People wrote those for shits and giggles , ive seen far less impressive software milking tons cash from the NHS for next to nothing - like a peer to peer desktop alert button ... you know who you are!

Not a prank, I know, but I will never forget the flying toaster screensaver.

I adored that one.

When trying to drag something to the trash, the trash can would move, making it impossible to put something in the trash.

Tramp as he looks about as old as I am.

I need his stylist at the moment. My normal hairdresser is booked until Wave 4.

To paraphrase Nike, just bic it.

For many an IT pro it's far too late for that ... it was all pulled out years ago.

Collegue leaves station unattended:

dash to pc

Print screen

win+r , mspaint

paste

set as wallpaper

optional extras:

rotate pic 180 (extra points for flipping screen at same time with nvidea shortcut: L-ALT + -> )

draw cock and balls on pic

..this should take no more than about 20 seconds

Modern, as in mid 90s?

I learnt tbe hard way that some "jolly japes" on the pc joke front lead to total sense of humour failures and the threat of involving HR.

:-(

In this case pc = political correctness not personal computer :-(

Thats just a failure by the I.T. geek to read peoples personality.

You dont pick victims randomly,

You pick Dave , whose always a good laugh and owes you a pint from when you recovered his presentation from the floppy he'd put through the wash ....

We had a guy who had a pirated version of a golf-game on his work PC.

When we updated all the equipment (1990's) we were instructed not to include FDDs on the new machines. They weren't necessary and as the external-virus threat was growing to be a pain it was a good step forward.

This guy was no simple 'user'. He had installed software before. He managed re-load his work PC surreptitiously with the wonderful game which he could then enjoy at any time as his monitor could not be observed from others in the room, desks faced inwards to ease internal co-operation.

You can imagine his reaction when 'golf.exe' (or whatever) brought up a warning screen, loud beep-beep-beep, virus, virus, virus etc. We had deleted his game and replaced it with a simple warning programme.

It didn't happen again. He wasn't very good at his primary task (sales), not sure about golf. He moved on.

I'm surprised you didn't club him to death...

I was going to say that that punishment fit the crime to a tee, but balls to that.

Oh I remember a call from a customer saying there was some urgent data that they had they needed to recover from a backup.

Oh good, I thought. They're diligently backing things up and remembered to ask how to do this when things went wrong.

After an hour or two of the backups not working, I realised it was from a later version of DOS. From someone else's PC. And the "urgent data" was a cracked version of a flight simulator their friend had got hold of somehow.

I didn't rat him out to his own boss but quietly explained this was a bit illegal and probably nut the sort of thing he ought to be doing with a company PC...

Back in 80s we wrote a number of programs to do "amusing" things to the screens of Sun workstations. One had a vaguely ant-like creature that would run across the screen and steal a letter. A more subtle one would displace letters up or down by one pixel - if you were actively working you probably wouldn't notice anything as the screen would get refreshed, but if you weren't doing anything after a while all the lines of text would become wavy.

I seem to remember back in the green screen days of word processing where I worked, we had a screen saver called DRIP on our Wang machines. When it timed in, it would copy whatever was on the screen at the time (like a very important document) and display it, before random individual letters would drop out of position and collect across the bottom of the screen. Caused much panic amongst the typists, who had only recently transferred from typewriters to word processors, and much hilarity amongst the IT "Professionals" (as we called ourselves), when called to save the day. A simple tap on the spacebar was all it took to "recover" the intact document.

Around 1986 I put together a stationary "screensaver" for Sun that made the screen look like it had a couple of bullet holes in it. I sometimes deployed in on systems where the user (engineer) had the screensaver set to random. Quite realistic on a Trinitron ... realistic enough to draw many a scream of "What the FUCK‽‽‽‽" from people who should know better.

I seem remember a Sun programme called 'melt' that err melted the text on the display. Also rotate that split the display into quarters and rotated them, or similar.

All could be run remote ly if you had the correct admin logins...

Back in the day (mid 1980s), I hacked the underlying code for some networking kit we were shipping to add a command ... "fire".

The entire command string was "set fire ". This raised voltage on an otherwise unused trace on the backplane, which in turn set off a squib.

I called TheBoss into my lab to tell him that I had discovered something that didn't look right ... He came down and I typed in "set fire node 3 card 1". This produced the nice ::crack:: and puff of smoke. The Boss looked startled, and quickly typed in "set fire node 1 card 5", which produced the same satisfying crack & smoke. Followed by node 4 card 2, same result.

Then he turned & grinned at me and said "jake, you BASTARD! ... he always was a quick study. Best boss I ever had.

Needless to say, I had the full compliment of cards on all 8 nodes on the test network wired. No, we were airgapped, and the code didn't make it out into the wild.

I concur with the above folks who suggest only playing this kind of game with people who not only get the joke, but also are fully equipped and willing to respond in kind. Makes life a trifle more ... interesting.

We did used to prank each other, the most memorable because it took a while for him to get to the bottom of it was introducing a hack to the command line interpreter which checked the username of the person logged in and introducing a delay in transmitting commands from the keyboard buffer to the command line, to make this more annoying we hard coded the username but set up a register to hold the delay. We were installing a very large new mainframe so with just 3 of was working to configure it response times were instantaneous, unless your name was Andy. Needless to say we started off with a very small lag and gradually increased it to the point where he was trying different pcs and network connections to try and get around the lag. we were very sympathetic and gave him several 'tips' on what to check out. After a couple of days he went very quiet fora couple of hours before leaping up shouting you Ba**ards. My other colleague and nearly wet ourselves as he was the 'calm one' on the team.