This is so cool. I'm wondering, is it because I was born in the 80s, or was the initial computer era more magical than now? It was all new but at the same time you could understand it. I could open my 286 and invert some fusibles until it was in a flashing loop at boot, or change my dad's autoexec.bat with random values and stop his (powerful) 486 from booting. Then it was all fixed when we brought it to his techy friend, who would give me the "what did you do this time?" look and then laugh.
PS: look at Amy's Art section of the blog, it's awesome!
We were supposed to break the computer (Win XP) in a fixable way then pass it down and the next person was asking for it so I did two simple things:
1. Stop the explorer process from running on boot. For those who don’t know, this mean that when the computer was done starting there was just the background and the mouse cursor. No login screen, no windows, no right-click menu. Nothing.
2. Replace the taskmgr.exe file with notepad.exe. This meant that when you were at the blank screen and pressed ctrl-alt-del it brought up notepad.
Nothing else did anything.
A viable solution would be to use Notepad, go to File > Open, navigate to explorer.exe (it was still in it’s default location), right-click it and select Open. But it meant you had to know that the open dialog was itself a fully functioning explorer window.
Haha that's funny! Good old times when you could do whatever in the system directory.
A highschool prank was to link a .bat file that would reboot the system into the autoexec folder of the Windows menu. Then look at teachers not understanding why the computer kept rebooting. Keeping shift pressed would allow you to skip autoexec.
Another favorite trick in university was to press a secret key combo on someone's linux lab computer while they were working on their project, the screen would be flipped vertically and they'd go nuts!
It's not just you. All tech is the most magical, exciting and scary somewhere near the midpoint of its sigmoid development curve, whether it's rocket launches in the 1960's, radio in the 1920's or steam engines in the 1880's (or so). Sooner or later everything becomes mundane. I'm guessing we are near that midpoint now with ML/AI.
Agree. This blog is terrific. I’m going to post the article about packing and expanding polygons. Exactly the sort of problem I like to ruminate on when sleep eludes.
PS: look at Amy's Art section of the blog, it's awesome!