Comment by geocrasher | Hacker News Reader

Comment by geocrasher | Hacker News Reader

Early 90's Southern California. I was about 15 and had been teaching myself Borland Turbo C++ at home with the SAMS book. At school, there was a room in the Library with about 20 386sx/16's that were used to teach kids... Borland TC++. The teacher? Another student who was good at programming. I didn't know him, but he had a reputation for being egotistical. My friend and I just went in there at lunch to play QBasic games, which I'd modify a bit for more fun.

One day I decided to mess with the egotistical teen teacher. I wrote a little TC++ program that ran from autoexec.bat. On bootup, it put out several seconds of a low frequency buzz from the PC speaker and then printed "Oh, Excuse me! I couldn't contain myself!" and then disappeared. At that point, the autoexec.bat removed the binary and then overwrite the old autoexec.bat over itself, removing any proof.

Nobody could say it was me, but the Librarian knew and said if I did it again I wouldn't be able to go back. But she also said he was really pissed by it and I get the feeling she got a kick out of it, too.

You reminded me of a time in high school when I worked for the local library. The librarian had a perverse habit of closing the windows in the back room during the summer, making it unbearably hot. My mother, who worked there full-time as the Children's Librarian--the Librarian's direct subordinate--told me that during winter this woman would open up the windows and make everyone freeze.

So while I worked on a program in FoxPro to automatically print out new catalog cards, I also wrote a small program in QuickBasic to print out (depending on the time of year) a message saying "OPEN THE WINDOW!" or "CLOSE THE WINDOW!" (the latter signed by "The Frozen Ghost") and then pause the computer for a good minute or so just to make sure somebody read it.

For good measure, I made the AUTOEXEC.BAT file and my program read-only, and then deleted ATTRIB.EXE from the hard disk so that it would at least be somewhat annoying to remove.

Years later I got a call from an IT tech who wanted to ask me some questions about DOS (he never specifically said why!) and I feigned ignorance. It felt good.

Here's mine - early 90's as well. My rural highschool had three computer labs, one with Macs for doing school newspaper type stuff, one with ancient TRS-80s for doing programming, and one with ancient PCs for learning typing. The PCs were on a network, and it was set up so you would boot the PC and it would log you into the network server, which would run a batch file from your home directory on the server. Seating was first-come, first serve.

So I made a batch file fragment that would copy itself at boot time from autoexec.bat into your profile script, and/or back from your profile script into the local autoexec.bat, to be run by whoever used that machine next. A couple of days later I checked back and it had replicated to every machine in the lab.

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