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.
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.
I really remember heatsinks being a thing on overclocked systems around that time frame and then once we got to P4 cpus the chilling towers appeared those things were massive
The lower power 486s didn’t even need a heatsink. The P3 was the first to take a heasink resembling what we have today, but damn did the P4s need some serious cooling.
It’s kinda funny how we think the 100 watts of a desktop P4 was insane when now the TDP of a high end laptop CPU is more than that.
My Pentium 100 even says “Heatsink req’d”
It’s kinda funny how we think the 100 watts of a desktop P4 was insane when now the TDP of a high end laptop CPU is more than that.
It really isn’t. Modern mobile cpus barely sip power.
PL2 on a 14900T is 106W
Edit: I’m an idiot, T series is low power socketed, not mobile. 14900HX has a TDP of 55W but boosts short term to 157W, which is still pretty ridiculous
If you meant cell phones and tablets, that’s mostly due to the different architecture. RISC processors are super energy efficient, which also makes them much cooler to run.
x86-64 is a CISC architecture, which tends to be much more power hungry. There are only a couple of very low power Celeron CPUs that work under 10W of TDP, while that’s very common among phones’ CPUs.
My 11950H (and all other “full power” Intel mobile CPUs) have a PL1 of >100 watts (109 for mine), and mine a PL2 of 139 watts. This laptop is about an inch thick.
Nothing about this laptop sips power, I’ve gotten as bad as 30 minutes of battery life out of a 90 watt hour battery not playing games.
I helped set up a friend’s “586” (about equivalent to a Pentium 1) and he had neglected to buy a heat sink or fan
A hammer was a sufficient heat sink for the time it took to set up windows
Super impressive since we used to play Quake 2 all day on it!
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
Can’t view this without cycling my VPN… We need a way to see reddit posts without visiting reddit. Is this a thing? Like… Piped for Reddit.
It explains that it means “fan failure”.
And there was a link to a video of it happening.
The only other link to an MS support page did not work.
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
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I remember getting sent to the principals office for “hacking” (pinging the computer in the next room) in like 8th grade.
Back in 4th/5th I actually was hacking, modifying our user menu to add Windows 3.1 and a password (copying config from a teacher’s profile). Also brute-forced at least two teachers passwords.
I’m a network architect now, so there’s that.
I remember labs full of networked Win 98 machines in middle school, with like Novell software on them for login credentials and whatnot. The computers sat there with a login screen and when students logged into it you would be presented with the Office suite and a restricted web browser and some educational packages. A lot of normal Win 98 stuff wasn’t there though, like any settings menus. But there was some convoluted way where you could bring up a help text and then by navigating deep in the menu system somehow cause it to launch to a “normal” Win 98 desktop.
I’d often bring a floppy with wolf3d or doom to deal with the boredom
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.
I remember an obscure one named “grommit” that was a dancing animated character and you’d click it to change arm and leg movements.
Bonzi buddy was over of the bad ones, maybe?
Bonzai buddy! Yes, that was one. Also I seem to recall naked women ones you couldn’t close.
I don’t remember grommit, but also I failed to find anything when trying to search it up. It shares its name with too many things.
I had a cottonelle puppy so basically a toilet paper ad. But it’s not even sold in my country, we have other brands.
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.
I thought I was the cool kid when I got my SoundBlaster 16!
The anticipation as you figure out a new IRQ and DMA configuration so you could play with your new toy
My dad used to disable the motherboard speaker because the noises games made back then were more annoying than fun. We eventually got a soundcard, and that was awesome.
Damn, I feel old now…
And you could plug in your joystick into the soundcard, because where else would you put joystick, right? Perfectly logical.
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.
Bleepers
386 era machines often had a 4 inch speaker in the front panel. It couldn’t do much. Some main boards still come with headers for a speaker, some even come with an electret beeper
Beep beep
A good number do, but you won’t hear anything during normal operation. If your vomputer has ever beeped at you when you try to turn it on at 0% battery, accessed the bios, etc., there’s a good chance that was the motherboard speaker.
Slightly related, it is really annoying you cant stop the boot speaker on the PS4 without voiding your warranty and ripping the speaker out
Lol the für Elise thing is funny. Back in highschool I got a “PC maintenance” credit which had me assigned as support in the computer lab. I made a batch script that ran on startup and showed a warning message saying the hard disk will self destruct and did a countdown from 10 with the motherboard speaker beeping down, fun times
Haha evil! I love it!
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
i have a vencord extension that does that
What’s the name of the game?
The original was just neko. It probably hasn’t been maintained in forever though.
There is a webneko that you can embed on your website:
https://webneko.net/
there was one called neko on windows
Reminds me of Rensenware.
What’s it called? I wanna see this
I don’t remember what it was called. I was in grade school. I just remembered it was the funniest thing.
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.
Oh don’t worry, malicious .exe files were all over the forums back then.
u aren’t wrong.
Sub7 existed before 2000 if I’m not mistaken.
I was just about to comment that this reminded me of the sub7 days. Not sure when it was released, but I definitely used it in 1998
Edit, memory was wrong, it was released in February 1999
How could I know, out of curiosity? I probably have the exe from the time period.
Try decompiling it.
Great question! Not really my area of expertise, but probably there are at least a couple of possible avenues. One is decompilation and/or disassembly and static analysis. (Basically use automated tools to reconstruct the original source code as best it can and then read that imperfect reconstruction of the source code to figure out what it does.) Another is isolating it (“air gap” – no network or connectivity to anything you care about) so you’re sure it can’t do any damage and running it with tools that record/report everything it does. (On Linux, one could use
straceand/or GDB. On Mac,dtrace. Not sure what the equivalent is for Windows programs running on Windows.)Actually, I guess another option could be to set up an isolated system, record a whole bunch of information about it before running the .exe then after running the .exe, examine it to see what you can find on the filesystem or in the registry or in RAM or whatever that might have changed. It wouldn’t catch everything, though. Like if it made a network connection or something but didn’t actually change anything on the filesystem, it might not leave any traces.
Whatever the case, it’d probably require some specialized tools and expertise. But it’d be an interesting project.
That last part, that’s what sandboxie is for
There are tracing programs that let you see when a program makes system calls to read and write files, control hardware, etc. It might be easiest to run it and see what it does in a VM sandbox. Process Monitor looks like a strace equivalent on windows.
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.
I had one of those, but it was just called putting something on the calculator key.
The modern school equivalent of cheap pranks on computers isn’t some elaborate virus, it’s just pressing the “mail” or “calculator” keys on the keyboard for the guy next to you. Never personally witnessed anything more elaborate, though my classmate apparently distributed dubious batch files he wrote once
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.
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!
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.
That joke was constant in the early 00s.
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?!”
I remember back when this was going around as
cokegift.exein the 90s.
