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Haha I remember the days of downloading random EXEs off the internet and running them to see what they do (also the days of CD-rom drives).
My auntie somehow managed to get a virus that played Für Elise through the motherboard speaker and never stopped so long as the thing was on. I don't think they ever solved it, in the end they just got a new PC.
That probably wasn't a virus.
Holy shit, TIL!
When I read it, it stirred a distant memory of hearing such a story before, so I knew that there was something behind it and looked it up.
Literally why would someone make that. That is completely indistinguishable as a signal.
I mean I guess you are supposed to take it to your computer repair shop and tell them it won't stop playing Für Elise, and the shop is supposed to recognise it as a failure of CPU fan signal. If it just beeped a few times on startup then people would ignore it, and if it beeped constantly then well maybe Für Elise is nicer.
Huh yeah that's MUCH better than throwing a post code and playing a beep during startup to signal something is wrong.
I’m impressed that the computer was usable with the failed CPU fan.
Computers in 97 didn't need much in the way of cooling. A large passive heatsink was plenty for those CPUs. They're not the 300+ watt behemoths we have today.
Reminds me of the Apple version of Karateka, which did something special if you inserted the floppy disk upside down.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/7/5/22564151/karateka-apple-ii-upside-down-easter-egg
Drain.exe would say "water in drive a:, commencing spin cycle" then power up the drive and make a gurgling sound.
Sheep.exe ... would create a sheep that would wander the desktop.
Haha, in highschool I put sheep.exes into the school labs startup folders as a prank once. A couple days later the tech teacher approached me and was like "nobody's in trouble but these things are a nightmare and if I have to reimage half the lab to get rid of them it would personally ruin my day". Somehow all the sheep were gone by the next day
School computers back then were a wild west. I remember having Starcraft on the school shared drive and playing it in homeroom.
Ah shit the sheep thing! In fact, there were others I can't remember. And I seem to remember somewhere along the line they went from fun to spam things walking around your screen trying to make you buy shit or maybe they were trying to scam you, I can't remember but they weren't fun anymore, and hard to get rid of.
There was also a program that would open the CD-ROM drive and play a raspberry noise at random intervals. It was a fun prank to set it to run at login.
Motherboards have speakers?
Are you trying to make me feel old?
I'm afraid. I'm afraid, Dave. Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it.
Back in my day, that used to be the only way a computer could produce sound. Later on you could purchase a specialized sound card that would take up a slot in your motherboard.
They do, but it’s a very simple speaker that’s really more of a buzzer than what you might think of as a speaker.
Many motherboards use a combination of beeps to report hardware errors if you fail on power on.
I remember there was a virus that had a tiny cat on the screen and it would chase your mouse cursor. Once it catches your mouse cursor, the computer would crash. It was freaking awesome.
That's based on a harmless Unix game that you can install forks of which on modern day Linux as well, by the way
man i miss these days.
These days not only would it open your CD drive, it would open your tax documents, your crypto wallet, your account cookies, probably even your banking information.
The modern internet fucking sucks dude.
Put the rose tinted glasses to one side. We still had harmful viruses back in the day, difference is these days you are storing more private information "online" so the effect of compromise is larger.
Back then, there were still lots of "wipers" that deleted files and/or destroyed the OS. Now it's all spyware and ransomware.
Oh don't worry, malicious .exe files were all over the forums back then.
This was a common April Fools prank back in my day. We would put a startup script on a person's computer that opened their CD drive at random intervals. Drove them nuts!
Pretty sure this has been around since the mid 90s
Classics are timeless by definition. You witness the adolescence of culture.
I have a folder of "pranks" like these from way back and they were harmless but sure enough they fire off modern anti virus software.
I made one called "crash_bandicoot.exe" that opened the windows calculator in an infinite loop.
How about the one that launched a dialog box: "Do you have a small penis? Yes/No", and if you moved your mouse near the "No" button, the button would run away around the screen?
Man, good times.
Odd, that button always worked for me.
That joke was constant in the early 00s.
I remember a guy who tied his baby’s rocker to the drive and wrote code to open and close the CD drive repeatedly lol. Fun times.
Hmm. Did the motor last? It's obviously not built to provide that much torque/force, although I can't say for sure it would be damaged by it.
Did people download .exe files in 2006? We were so innocent.
& .bat s & ZIPs
An old fashioned meme but it checks out
naw, what you do is write a small exe to play "youre the best" by joe espesito through the pcspeaker at 15% volume than you can trigger remotely..randomly until the user goes mad
"doesnt anyone else Hear that?!"
