Piracy is theft
In the 80s, I was asked to make a copy of Fruit Machine Simulator on the spectrum 48k for my brother's friend.

However, instead of copying it, we wrote a programme something along the lines of

10 PRINT "The reason you are seeing this message"
20 PRINT "is because you have pirated this software"
30 PRINT "We have detected that your address"
40 PRINT "is 16 Butterfield Close"
50 PRINT "and the police have been informed"

..and saved that on the tape.

The friend's dad loaded the game and apparently was thinking about phoning the police in order to hand himself in.
( monkeon schmonkeon, Fri 14 Dec 2007, 12:28, 6 replies)

Along those lines....
More Spectrum 48k japery - back in the days when they used to have the current 'home computers' on display for demonstration in WHSmiths, you could go up and type whatever you wanted in to the Spectrum or C64 or whatever. At the time I knew the code to make the loading bars appear on the screen, and combining that with a line of text saying 'Loading: Jet Set Willy 4' and a GOTO 10 line and you'd have an endless loading screen which was guaranteed to draw a huge crowd of increasingly excited kids dying to see the latest game, which would never appear...
( propellerhed, Fri 14 Dec 2007, 13:02, closed)

I love Computer Pranks.
Think the code was Randomize USR 1032 or something like that for the loading bars :)

I had a mate who was like obsessed he would get a virus on his Amiga 1200. That was back in the days when we just used floppy disks. Everytime you gave him a disk "It hasnt got a virus on has it?" and everytime his computer crashed, or did something funny "Do you think I have a virus?"

So one day when i was round at his, I sneaked a message on the boot sector of one of his disks, saying "WARNING ARMSTRONG VIRUS DETECTED. SYSTEM STATE CRITICAL REBOOT NOW"
Didnt take him long to be on the phone. "I have a virus!!!!" So i went round and removed the message by just restoring the original boot block, and he tried paying me as well. But I couldnt accept it. Im not that much of a cunt.
(Miggyman, Fri 14 Dec 2007, 14:35, closed)

oooo Speccys!
you could SAVE stuff to a tape?!?!?
(TheManofScience, Fri 14 Dec 2007, 15:01, closed)

Hahaha, excellent
That gets a click from me =)
(Professor Kenny Martin Hmm? What?, Fri 14 Dec 2007, 16:05, closed)

In order to get us all equipped with a refreshing cuppa at regular intervals of the night when all our friends were gathered
my friends invented various 'tea games', these were the equivalent of Paper Scissors Stone and would decide a 'winnar' who then made the tea.

At one stage we used this simple program on the retired ZX81: 10 A=rnd(amount of folks there)
20 print A

And this would generate a random number, each of us picked a number at the start of the night, and if it was your number, you made the tea.

Fine, except you can seed the random string with all the same numbers if you like, which we did, so it was the same chap who had to make us tea all night!

After growing suspicious he even examined our complex programming, and because he could see no subtefuge on our part, wandered off to make the tea once more...
( ..wil, Fri 14 Dec 2007, 19:39, closed)

heh heh!
"Home taping is killing music"

If only everybody had taped Clif Richard.
( finnbar has officially retired, Sat 15 Dec 2007, 10:23, closed)