An evil trick that I played once upon a time

[thewayne]

(i.e. four decades ago)

What brought it to mind was a friend bought a new laptop that was giving him weird problems, and I showed him a program called Furmark that really stresses graphics cards and GPUs by drawing a super hi-res eyeball on your screen.

Back in the days of the original PC and PC-XT, I came upon a Dos program that drew a giant eyeball on the screen. It was slightly bloodshot, it would occasionally blink, and it would slowly and randomly scan back and forth across the screen, it was sort of a screen saver to prevent monitor burn-in as that was a real problem back then. This was around '86-'88, I was working for a pension plan/actuarial company doing database development.

I shared my office with the woman who did almost all the word processing for the company, I also did a lot of contract processing along with time keeping. Our office was kinda high-traffic. One day I left that eyeball program running when I went to lunch. I took a late lunch, around 3pm or so, as I worked 10-7. Normally I'd have a screen saver like flying toasters or whatever, or I'd turn the monitor off.si

I came back, and this guy who was fairly credulous came up and asked me about the giant eyeball. I told him it was a security program and that if anyone messed with my keyboard, it would take a picture of them.

And he bought it.

In the mid '80s. We didn't have web cams at that time. For that matter, we didn't have the world wide web at that time! Barely had the internet!

My alignment is chaotic silly, why do you ask?

Comments

[ranunculus]

*LOL* And read it to M who laughed.
I remember that eyeball, and the flying toasters....

[thewayne]

Here's a story you might appreciate! When I worked at the police department through the '90s, we had like seven precincts, and one of the precincts had a problem. At odd times, their server would seemingly crash. We'd remote into the server, and all seemed fine. Later on, rinse/repeat. And it would almost always happen after the officer/administrator left for the day.

The precinct was fairly close to where one of our guys in the administrator group lived, so he decided he'd swing by one day after work. He walks into the server closet, and he finds the server is RUNNING THE 3D PIPES SCREEN SAVER! These servers did not have beefy graphics cards, so it was eating up the CPU to render the pipes, thus effectively killing the server! Bruce changed it back to just a black screen and locked the permissions down a little tighter.

The precinct server admin, not really being a computer guy, just someone with some knack and a slightly above average knowledge of computers, thought it looked spiffy.

We had a similar problem with the haunted house screen saver. Disk space was so tight in those days that people would install that screen saver on their network drive to run locally on their PC, and when it fired up, the server would get really slow.