This is possibly the geekiest story ever.
Probably my happiest time at school was just pre GCSEs. I'd left behind a mediocre circle of largely very nice, but football obsessed, friends (doesn't do it for me) and managed to fall in with the clever kids. Our school was pretty weird as somehow, through unerring decency, friendliness and wit, the cleverest chappy in our year also happened to be one of the most popular. Cue not an awful lot to worry about and plenty of time to get on with enjoyment of learning and creativity without fear of reprisal.

So anyway two of my best friends, remaining so to this day, in that group were gregarious popular erudite Matt (above), and introverted, ludicrously clever Dave. We're talking like rocket science clever. We got heavily into writing games together, me taking more of a lead on the art, design and music side of things but doing the odd bit of coding and Dave dealing with the meat.

This is back in the early days of Pentuim processors and latter days of good old MS-DOS. So we were mostly coding in Qbasic because it was all we had, but one day Dave turned up with a little assembly language program that swapped two numbers around and added them together. Next day he turned up with a fully fledged sound driver. Now we had power.

The next day's program was effectively a virus. A little program you ran that stayed memory resident in DOS and every time a key was pressed there was a 1 in 10 chance it would print something abusive at you on the screen. So I leant Dave my extensive collection of .TXT pr0n about comic book charactes (told it was geeky). This was promply incorporated into the program and it was installed on every PC in the department. Reams of filth everywhere when anyone tried to type something. Brilliant.

Over a few weeks we developed our masterpiece. A DOS program that counted up in Dave's voice (slightly sped up):

"Its the ONE! head dwarf. Its the TWOO head dwarf. Its the THREE head dwarf" etc. up to around the point where something went wrong with the numbers which I think was in the region of 360,000

It was deployed one lunchtime across every PC in the room and they were left to chorus to perplexed pupils and teachers.

Mmm large scale geeky bafflement goodness.

No punch line. Am I meant to have one?
( Throat And Ice Pie I see dem tatties dere., Fri 30 Jan 2009, 17:03, Reply)