Stirting MS-DOS: my computer pranks

I wanted to play a joke on the kids who were picking on me, so I wrote a little program that moved the mouse by one pixel every 10 seconds. Then I forgot about it. In class the teacher announced: “Andrey has broken our computers, he needs a telling-off!” And the class went: “Wow, that’s cool, how did you do it?” It worked out exactly the other way round.

Another joke was about booting DOS. I opened the system file IO.SYS, found the text “Starting MS-DOS” inside and changed it to “Stirting”. The computer booted as usual, it just greeted you with a typo. All of this was very fragile: damage or delete the file and the computer won’t boot, so you boot from a floppy and copy the files back.

In Windows 98 you could replace the picture shown at startup and at shutdown. Power supplies weren’t ATX yet, the computer couldn’t switch itself off, and at the end Windows showed “It’s now safe to turn off your computer”. I put that picture on startup. People switch the computer on, see that it’s now safe to turn it off, and switch it off without letting it boot.