Giving you the backstory and appraisals of vintage memes!
Submissions should be vintage memes or commentary about vintage memes. Commenters are advised to appraise the internet value and provenance meme antiquities.
Rules:
I liked the random.exe that unmuted your computer, turned the volume to max, and said "hey everybody, I'm downloading pornography!". My friend got a big kick out of that when he ran it at work. .......ah, those were the days....
The thought of clicking on some random.exe hurt me a little inside...
So much trust, or ignorance, or both lol
How do you think we got to this level of distrust?
Even then was a bad move. Speaking from experience.
Abuse of trust by hackers, scammers, thieves and other scum on the internet that try to min-max criminality.
2006 was 18 years ago, not 10.
No it wasnt.
It was only a couple of years ago.
stop lying
STOP LYING 😭
Reading is for chumps!
What did I read wrong?
an image from 2016
It was right in the title, man.
I concede.
This reminds me of a similar joke from AIM days.
You could tell your friends that you were going to "hack" their computer.
They would of course not believe you.
You would then send them a few images that looked hackery and a few that were broken.
The broken images were actually a link to "A:/fakeimage.jpg" and "D:/fakeimage.jpg".
This would cause A drive, the common "floppy" drive, to turn on and look for a fake image for a few seconds. As I recall this worked even with no disk inserted and made a bunch of noise.
Similarly the D drive, the common CD drive, would spin up, also making noise. I believe this did require a disk in the drive, but at the time everyone always had some form of disk in the drive.
What you had really done was nothing, but making your friends computer make noise unexpectedly was still funny.
There was an AOL instant messenger exploit back in the day where you would send a link or attachment or something and it would cause the other person's desktop wallpaper to change to a big dick or something, and all of the desktop icons were turned into other porn thumbnails. Lastly, it would turn the windows 95 or 98 or whatever volume up to 100% and blast porn tracks. It was brutal. My friends would do it to each other all the time.
Jesus. Somebody got kicked out of their house over that, guaranteed.
There was a whole collection of "hacker" programs seemingly exclusively made and used by 12.5-13.5-year-olds that did these things. AOHell was the most well-known.
That was me! I was those kids! We had crews and handles (tags?) And the whole thing!
And then you look at 12 year olds now and they don’t even know how to save files, or type properly on a keyboard.
You could send .exe and .bat executable files. Many of them were actual viruses disquised as pranks.
I love stuff like this. I can't think of a good equivalent now.
Not a remote trick but put a small sticky note on the bottom of the mouse to cover the light. Or CTRL + ALT + DOWN ARROW to rotate the screen upside down, should work on win10.
Back in the early 2000's I was working tech support, which gave me admin access to users' computers over the network. I could pop open their CD drives from my desk; drove one particular user absolutely batty for a day.
What is this "Seedy Rom Drive"?
Seedyznuts
I'm sorry
lolGOTEM
People would click God damn anything two decades ago
Yep, back in the very early 2000s, this was something we did at school to jokke around.
The cupholder joke was neat, it had a nice official looking UI with the Coca Cola logo, and a corporate style promotion text, there was a button to click to accept the "gift", and only then did the CD drive open.
Then I remember running a joke program that would make the startbutton jump around on the screen.
So nothing's changed?
I still couldn't resist to be honest. It can be done safely. Well, mostly. Some things may decide to overwrite the BIOS with Nyan cat, for example.
“It said nude pictures of Anna Kournikova…”
I'm listening
An exquisite find
That gag is a bit older than just 2006. I remember it circulating the warez scene back in 1998. Might even be older. Truly antique!
I was working in my college's computer lab in '97/'98 and this was old then. The freshmen kept falling for it every year!
I can't speak to the executable, but I know back in '95 the joke about someone calling support and asking why they have a cup holder but no CD drive was already crusty. There were a bunch of variations, but here's the first one I found for those too young to remember:
Customer: "Can you help me, the cup holder on my new computer broke, and I don't know what to do?
Friend: "Cup holder? What are you talking about? None of our computers come with a cup holder attached to them, and I've never heard of one that did."
Customer: Yes, well the one you sold me did, and the other day I went to set a mug of coffee on it and it just snapped off!"
Friend: "Sir, can you describe what the cup holder looks like, because I still can't picture what a cup holder on a computer would look like?"
At this point the customer is getting a little irritated!
Customer: "Look, I don't know how you could not know that you sell computers with cup holders on them, because it's right in the middle of the thing, and when you push a button on the side, it pops out so you can set your drink on it, and it says 4X on the front cover!"
A long pause . . .
Friend: Sir, are you telling me, you're using your CD-Rom drive as a beverage holder?"
Customer: "What's a CD-Rom Drive?"
And now, a terrible bonus joke that is completely unrelated but was around at about the same time:
How do you know if you're addicted to the Internet? You get a tattoo that says "This body best viewed with Netscape 2.01 or higher."
I remember getting it from Coca-Cola about that time. Even packed it with a logo.