I did something similar a long while ago, albeit less inspired: https://www.flickr.com/photos/ruicarmo/10493954496/in/album-...

(there's a photo of a Nokia "running" Linux in that album - https://www.flickr.com/photos/ruicarmo/16931940010/in/album-... - I got a lot of mileage out of that animated GIF)

I think the email is what shifted it from being a funny joke to being super obnoxious to a lot of people. If it had just been the message on the printer, a lot of people wouldn't have noticed it and a lot of people that did would have had a quiet chuckle about it at worst.

The email is what turned it from being a speed bump to a major impediment to people, at least mentally.

I became a lot engaged more in class after realising I could remotely shutdown the teacher's computer with a custom message.

In middle school our entire school network was running some strange windows server p2p setup. What this means is that any computer could issue commands across the network to other computers, purely by knowing the name of the port. Luckily, every ethernet "outlet" had a label stating the port's name. This made it stupidly simple to issue a `shutdown \M <PORT>` in the middle of class.

Ah, the ol' change-printer-ready-message-to-insert-coin prank.

I did this in the early 10s on a fleet of hateful HP MFPs at my first job.

I think it's the only way that people who get the "printer guy" label can stay sane in the office.

I guess I'll contribute my best prank.

In the late '00s I was working at a small ed tech company that had recently moved into a nice new HQ with a large kitchen. They got this pretty fancy popcorn maker and the IT team put it together (I was a dev, so I was not on this team). People kept burning the popcorn, so it became the office/facilities manager, Tim's duty to make the popcorn (which he was not exactly happy about).

I was in the IT closet looking for some cables and noticed a bunch of spare networking equipment laying around. So I grabbed an old four-port switch, an external wifi antenna, and some cables, then I stayed late one night and "installed" them on the popcorn machine in a manner that was surprisingly convincing. IoT Popcorn machine before IoT was a thing.

I also wrote up a script that would connect to our Outlook server, and send an email to Tim, "FROM: TECH-POP <techpop-machine@companyname>" with "SUBJECT: TECH-POP IS READY TO BE REFILLED" and some techy-sounding status updates in the body of the email. I even kept track of the number of popcorn bags remaining in the cabinet.

Once every few hours, I'd run the script, and Tim would dutifully get up and make some popcorn. After about a day, I ran the script and heard loud, "GOD FUCKING DAMNIT", and the slamming of a chair. Tim went over and ripped all of the networking stuff off of the popcorn machine and threw it in the trash. He then paid a visit to the IT manager to clarify who it was that thought it was his job to "refill the fucking popcorn". The IT manager, with a completely straight face, gets up and I see them walking my direction.

They get to my desk, and the guy is coming down from being piss-pissed. His face is all red and eyes are watering. The IT manager tells him, "it was this fool's idea." They laugh and say it was a funny prank and Tim playfully grabs my collar and shakes me a little.

After that, I get a message from the IT manager to avoid pranking Tim in the future.

At my old uni there were a couple public terminals running DOS, most of the time sitting idle at the prompt. It was bespoke kiosk cabinets only exposing keyboard and screen. One April Fool's I had the bright idea to change PROMPT to something along the lines of "This terminal out of service." - and to increase the confusion, also to change PATH to a non-existent directory, so that most commands wouldn't work and instead flash "Bad command or file name.".

For a couple minutes observed people coming up to a terminal, trying a few things, and stepping away in frustration.

I sure hope administration did restart the terminals overnight to return regular function; normal users were unable to access the power & reset controls.

I thought the joke was things were running on HP-UX (said the guy that had to use campus services running on HP-UX in the 90s).

Let the 90's Unix flame wars begin!

I always thought a fun but fireable April Fools joke would be to sprinkle the words "probably" and "likely" to key parts in technical documentations.

To me, the administration clearly screwed up. They were thinking about implementing something that was done as a prank. They could have just told everyone it was a prank and not to worry but instead, they reacted like the backlash was too bad and then told everyone we might be doing it anyway but not just now. This would have been an easy way for them to see the reaction and be thankful that they didn't do it and could just say it was a prank.

Informix is the april fools joke.

Does anyone remember the Informix / Oracle wars? What a time to be alive that was.