When I was in high school in the 90s a group of us in computer class made a ‘virus’ that would launch the hamster dance website in all of the classroom computers randomly. We had to put it on a diskette and install it manually on each computer but at the time none of the computers even had antivirus so the school had to reformat them to remove it.

used to be fun at the office to take a screenshot of someone desktop, and make it the desktop background, then put all their icons into one folder.

A virus that changes Windows’ sticky keys to only requiring two taps of the shift key.

There was a guy in my dorm who really didn’t like his roommate. Really, really didn’t like him. This was in the early aughts.

So one day he goes on his roommate’s computer and puts a text file in his startup folder. The file says, “Your computer has been infected by the Snood virus!”

For context, Snood was a free video game people downloaded in the early aughts. Basically the same as Bust-A-Move, which probably doesn’t clarify anything if you didn’t already know what Snood is.

Anyway: “Your computer has been infected by the Snood virus! If you don’t score [extremely difficult but not completely unrealistic high score] points, all of your files will be deleted!”

He laughed to himself and promptly forgot about it.

Weeks later, the roommate is on his computer in the middle of the night.

“What are you doing up? Go to bed.”

“I can’t. It’s this stupid Snood virus.”

theres used to be a DOS batch script line you could put into a windows startup that pipes the video output into the keyboard input, immediately crashing the machine. i believe this was patched after windows 7.

I’d make Windows 11

Edit: Whoops, that’s not harmless

When I worked at an MSP in early 2000s they would “prank” new hires with a site that did this. It would keep creating popups so you couldn’t close them. That stopped after customers heard it. More horrid graphical “pranks” replaced it of course.

I wrote a simple script once that ran in the background and all it did was toggle the state of the caps lock key every 30 minutes. I set it up on a co-worker’s computer as a scheduled task for an April Fools prank one year. I thought for sure he’d figure it out pretty quickly, but by mid-day, he had completely disassembled his keyboard, convinced the button was getting stuck due to gunk buildup. Eventually I ended up just disabling the task so he thought he had managed to fix it himself.

«I’m watching porno» - not porn. This was around y2k

Oh, I have a seemingly harmless idea so evil, it will ruin the internet forever.
I will make it so every time you open any website, there will be a popup with a question that asks you to invade your privacy, and you can allow it to do so with one click, but you will have to dig through menus if you want to avoid it. Then, after some seconds, another popup will appear, asking you to create a login, no matter what you do. Then, it randomly will ask you to share your location. Yes, with a popup again. Then, just as you thought you’re done, another window will open, grabbing your focus, which will demand you talk to a chatbot, and you can’t close this one, only slightly minimize it.

I had a boss that wasn’t exactly technical. I wrote a power shell program that would randomly every 5-30 minutes give a pop-up that said “good job”, which he always said regardless of what was going on. Placed it in his startup folder on his machine. I thought he would figure it out and tell me to knock it off… Well I forgot about it, 9 months later during my annual performance review it popped up while I was looking at his screen. He apologized and just alt tabbed it away.

I offered to take a look and see if I couldn’t stop it, and he said yes and then walked away to take a break. I then deleted the script I put on there. He gave me extra performance points (meaning a higher pay raise.)

I remember a harmless over that just randomly opened your CD tray while it ran. Called something like cup holder, or something like that.

Shit that was a long time ago…

I don’t remember the details but my mom’s first cousin called me once to fix her computer when I was a teenager.

No matter what she typed it came out as, “I AM FUCKING GAY!”

Seems like all I had to do was type “stop”.

I Rick Rolled my entire school this way. Write a program that maxed the volume and held it there at 100%, minimised all open windows, downloaded a photo of Rick Astley and set it as your wallpaper, then started playing Never Gonna Give You Up. The only way to stop it was to power off the computer or wait the song out, then manually fix your wallpaper.

I saved the executable in a publically accessible location on the school’s server that I shouldn’t have had write access to, and sent a cleverly disguised link to a mate. He thought it was hilarious, and forwarded the email to a dozen of his mates. They forwarded it to all their mates, and pretty soon no teacher could go 60 seconds without another one of their students’ laptops interrupting the class at max volume.

Best bit? I “taught a valuable lesson in cybersecurity” and didn’t get in (much) trouble!!

In the early 90s there was a virus going around that made the floppy drive’s loading noises play the Imperial March.