this post was submitted on 04 Jan 2024
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Antique Memes Roadshow

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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.

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[–] MimicJar@lemmy.world 84 points 10 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] FeelzGoodMan420@eviltoast.org 42 points 10 months ago (4 children)

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.

[–] themeatbridge@lemmy.world 21 points 10 months ago

You could send .exe and .bat executable files. Many of them were actual viruses disquised as pranks.

[–] ReallyActuallyFrankenstein@lemmynsfw.com 12 points 10 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] blazeknave@lemmy.world 8 points 10 months ago

That was me! I was those kids! We had crews and handles (tags?) And the whole thing!

[–] Kiosade@lemmy.ca 6 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

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.

[–] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 3 points 10 months ago

Jesus. Somebody got kicked out of their house over that, guaranteed.

[–] CanadaPlus@futurology.today 2 points 10 months ago

Jesus. Somebody got kicked out of their house over that, guaranteed.

[–] The_Picard_Maneuver@startrek.website 11 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I love stuff like this. I can't think of a good equivalent now.

[–] YoorWeb@lemmy.world 4 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

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.