this post was submitted on 10 Jun 2024
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Haha I remember the days of downloading random EXEs off the internet and running them to see what they do (also the days of CD-rom drives).
My auntie somehow managed to get a virus that played Für Elise through the motherboard speaker and never stopped so long as the thing was on. I don't think they ever solved it, in the end they just got a new PC.
That probably wasn't a virus.
https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/2bs41z/til_that_if_your_bios_was_made_by_awardunicore/
Holy shit, TIL!
When I read it, it stirred a distant memory of hearing such a story before, so I knew that there was something behind it and looked it up.
Literally why would someone make that. That is completely indistinguishable as a signal.
I mean I guess you are supposed to take it to your computer repair shop and tell them it won't stop playing Für Elise, and the shop is supposed to recognise it as a failure of CPU fan signal. If it just beeped a few times on startup then people would ignore it, and if it beeped constantly then well maybe Für Elise is nicer.
Huh yeah that's MUCH better than throwing a post code and playing a beep during startup to signal something is wrong.
Sadly, many motherboards don't have POST code displays.
Hm. Well if the motherboard can play a song it can blast " Error" during startup to be infinitely more helpful.
I don't think those speakers are capable of voice. They can handle a few different beep tones and that's about it. The song was not like listening to Spotify, it was played using beep tones.
I had an Athlon motherboard with voice POST messages… one night I woke up to it saying “your CPU has a problem!” over and over and was freaked out until I was completely awake and figure out what was wrong.
It wasn’t high quality coming through the piezo speaker, but it was good enough.
I’m impressed that the computer was usable with the failed CPU fan.
Computers in 97 didn't need much in the way of cooling. A large passive heatsink was plenty for those CPUs. They're not the 300+ watt behemoths we have today.
I really remember heatsinks being a thing on overclocked systems around that time frame and then once we got to P4 cpus the chilling towers appeared those things were massive
The lower power 486s didn't even need a heatsink. The P3 was the first to take a heasink resembling what we have today, but damn did the P4s need some serious cooling.
It's kinda funny how we think the 100 watts of a desktop P4 was insane when now the TDP of a high end laptop CPU is more than that.
My Pentium 100 even says "Heatsink req'd"
I helped set up a friend's "586" (about equivalent to a Pentium 1) and he had neglected to buy a heat sink or fan
A hammer was a sufficient heat sink for the time it took to set up windows
Super impressive since we used to play Quake 2 all day on it!
Reminds me of the Apple version of Karateka, which did something special if you inserted the floppy disk upside down.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/7/5/22564151/karateka-apple-ii-upside-down-easter-egg
Drain.exe would say "water in drive a:, commencing spin cycle" then power up the drive and make a gurgling sound.
Sheep.exe ... would create a sheep that would wander the desktop.
Haha, in highschool I put sheep.exes into the school labs startup folders as a prank once. A couple days later the tech teacher approached me and was like "nobody's in trouble but these things are a nightmare and if I have to reimage half the lab to get rid of them it would personally ruin my day". Somehow all the sheep were gone by the next day
I remember getting sent to the principals office for "hacking" (pinging the computer in the next room) in like 8th grade.
Back in 4th/5th I actually was hacking, modifying our user menu to add Windows 3.1 and a password (copying config from a teacher's profile). Also brute-forced at least two teachers passwords.
I'm a network architect now, so there's that.
I remember labs full of networked Win 98 machines in middle school, with like Novell software on them for login credentials and whatnot. The computers sat there with a login screen and when students logged into it you would be presented with the Office suite and a restricted web browser and some educational packages. A lot of normal Win 98 stuff wasn't there though, like any settings menus. But there was some convoluted way where you could bring up a help text and then by navigating deep in the menu system somehow cause it to launch to a "normal" Win 98 desktop.
I'd often bring a floppy with wolf3d or doom to deal with the boredom
Ah shit the sheep thing! In fact, there were others I can't remember. And I seem to remember somewhere along the line they went from fun to spam things walking around your screen trying to make you buy shit or maybe they were trying to scam you, I can't remember but they weren't fun anymore, and hard to get rid of.
I remember an obscure one named "grommit" that was a dancing animated character and you'd click it to change arm and leg movements.
Bonzi buddy was over of the bad ones, maybe?
Bonzai buddy! Yes, that was one. Also I seem to recall naked women ones you couldn't close.
I don't remember grommit, but also I failed to find anything when trying to search it up. It shares its name with too many things.
I had a cottonelle puppy so basically a toilet paper ad. But it's not even sold in my country, we have other brands.
There was also a program that would open the CD-ROM drive and play a raspberry noise at random intervals. It was a fun prank to set it to run at login.
Motherboards have speakers?
Are you trying to make me feel old?
I'm afraid. I'm afraid, Dave. Dave, my mind is going. I can feel it.
Back in my day, that used to be the only way a computer could produce sound. Later on you could purchase a specialized sound card that would take up a slot in your motherboard.
I thought I was the cool kid when I got my SoundBlaster 16!
The anticipation as you figure out a new IRQ and DMA configuration so you could play with your new toy
My dad used to disable the motherboard speaker because the noises games made back then were more annoying than fun. We eventually got a soundcard, and that was awesome.
Damn, I feel old now....
And you could plug in your joystick into the soundcard, because where else would you put joystick, right? Perfectly logical.
They do, but it’s a very simple speaker that’s really more of a buzzer than what you might think of as a speaker.
Many motherboards use a combination of beeps to report hardware errors if you fail on power on.
Beep beep
386 era machines often had a 4 inch speaker in the front panel. It couldn't do much. Some main boards still come with headers for a speaker, some even come with an electret beeper
Bleepers
Lol the für Elise thing is funny. Back in highschool I got a "PC maintenance" credit which had me assigned as support in the computer lab. I made a batch script that ran on startup and showed a warning message saying the hard disk will self destruct and did a countdown from 10 with the motherboard speaker beeping down, fun times