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anyone remember these joke programs?

nige the hippy

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Apr 7, 2006
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I've been looking for these joke programs from the '80s and can't find them on the web.

1) Monster.... makes a scary monster slide briefly up the screen whenever you press "M" more fun than it sounds, as most normal people only look at the screen from out of the corner of their eye when they type.

and

2) Disk washer... does a full wash cycle & cleans all the bits off your HDD then spins it dry, makes all the appropriate noises on an MFM drive (actually doesn't remove anything, but it had my workmate wetting himself as he hadn't backed anything up in months) also note, it wasn't recommended to just pull the plug on an old pc because of head crashes.
 
I remember the Disc Washer. And haven't seen it in years, but somewhere I've got the WIN 95+ Aquarium Theme .. When you hit a certain hot key a little hammer hits the aquarium glass and the water starts to run out and a mouse sand clock starts to run. Eventually the fish are flopping and a banner comes up with any text you type in.. Put it on net at work years ago and almost got canned....
 
One of the most frightening moments was the first time I watched the C64 demo "Think Twice I" by The Judges (Dutch group). After a nice intro part, it suddenly turns into a very realistic, noisy static, just like you lost the video signal. It could happen e.g. if the computer all of a sudden broke down badly. After a few seconds, the noise is turned off and a scroller appears on top of the static. Phew, it was just a fake.
 
No, A. I know which one I'm talking about, and you're possibly too young to have seen it, you had to be in my work area when it ran, the guy I worked with was 1/2 Iranian, and he went paler than me, and stayed that way for 1/2 an hour! I thought he was going to kill me when he found out it was my joke.

any links to the hard disk draining program?
 
Maybe it was you who needed a back-up plan, in case he would get violent. ;-)

I suppose harmless screensavers such as those who mirror the display and likewise barely count here? I mean, they don't scare anyone.
 
I remember we had fun with the program that would wait some random amount of time and then take whatever text you had on the screen and flip it upside down. (Was it called "FLIPPER"?)

There was another one that made what looked like animated ASCII spiders or ants crawl across your screen. I think I'd just found that one recently on an old floppy. Sadly, it's dependant on clock speed, so on a modern machine you won't even see it. (Edit: It's called BUGRES.COM)
 
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Oh don't laugh,

once had a machine in to repair, when we looked at it it had a full 33MB disk full of CGA porn films (they had to be viewed from 20 feet away with your eyes screwed up to get any degree of realism). Actually (sad me!) I thought at the time that it was a shame that I couldn't save them, as it was the first time I'd seen FILM on the PC.

Actually never thought of using the word "pranks" to search, it's not used much here.
 
I remember we had fun with the program that would wait some random amount of time and then take whatever text you had on the screen and flip it upside down. (Was it called "FLIPPER"?)

There was another one that made what looked like animated ASCII spiders or ants crawl across your screen. I think I'd just found that one recently on an old floppy. Sadly, it's dependant on clock speed, so on a modern machine you won't even see it.

Yes and yes. I had that program and it didn't work well on faster machines. (the ant/spider prog).
 
Ah, all the fun...

From an old time Amiga guy,

Flip, which was the flipper thing...

Tilt, which tilted the display about 20 degrees and then flashed the infamous Guru warning <<<TILT!!!!>>> (If you had an Amiga with WB 1.x, you KNOW what a Guru Mediation meant...)

Melt was fun, too... the whole screen would just ooze off....

Megatron was another one, it had the little robot that would chase your mouse, and then blow up if it made contact.

There were a whole bunch of Guru Hacks (things like computer chair error, food on tie error, boss over shoulder error.... stuff like that) that would come up with the red flashy bars... very easy to do on Ami...

I hadn't thought about those in years... I'll have to search them on aminet and run them on uae...
 
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