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526 points goldenskye | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.698s | source
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kmoser ◴[] No.43550367[source]

So many pranks, I didn't bother waiting until April 1st to pull them.

Prank 1: In high school we wrote a fake DOS for our Apple II+. It accepted commands and ran them, but occasionally would reply with a snarky message. Our teacher was not amused.

Prank 2: This was the late 1970s/early 1980s when laser printers cost many thousands of dollars, and neither me nor my high school peers had ever seen one. I found some CGI images in a computer magazine and Xeroxed them onto pin-feed paper for dot-matrix printers. I showed them to my friends and convinced them that I owned a laser printer. The pin-fed holes just added to the authenticity, since they had no idea how a real laser printer worked.

Prank 3: My parents changed checking accounts and had a whole book of unused checks. I told my father I wanted to do a prank and he agreed to write one of those checks for $600. I showed the check to one of my classmates at the beginning of the day and told him I was going to buy a computer after school, and he could come with me. When school ended and my classmate found me, I took out the check, declared I no longer wanted a computer, and ripped it up in his face. He was stunned.

Prank 4: The local library had an Atari 400 with a coin-operated TV screen ($0.25 for 15 minutes). Without the use of the screen, I wrote a simple BASIC program to emit a beep randomly every few minutes, started it running, and walked out the door.

replies(2): >>43552717 #>>43553981 #
1. snerbles ◴[] No.43552717[source]

> I wrote a simple BASIC program to emit a beep randomly every few minutes, started it running, and walked out the door.

Some 15+ years ago ThinkGeek productized this as the Annoy-a-Tron, a small magnetic circuit board which could run on a coin cell for weeks. Tuck one of these into a well-hidden place and it will dismantle the sanity of anyone spending enough time around it.

Other more refined versions exist now from a plethora of vendors, I will refrain from linking them here.

replies(1): >>43553289 #
2. flakes ◴[] No.43553289[source]

On one of my internships there was a small handheld radio floating around the office. I changed it to some local AM jazz station, set it to the lowest possible volume (such that it was barely audible), and hid the radio inside another interns desktop. I told the other interns about it, and we agreed that whenever he asked anyone if they could hear music, that we would tell him we couldn't hear anything.

At first he seemed mildly annoyed but mostly ignored it. You couldn't always hear it depending on what song was playing, so that helped keep it hidden for a while. Fast forward one week, we came back from lunch to find that the guy had disassembled almost everything in his cubicle before finding it. He angrily held up the radio and called us all jackasses. I have a little chuckle every time I remember this!