On April 2, 1995, Mosaic for Windows users awoke to discover their browsers were behaving oddly.
About three weeks earlier, the team was celebrating wrapping up a release at a reasonable hour (for once) when I uttered the words, “You know, this is the last release we are putting out before April Fools’ day.”
Everyone in earshot somehow thought this was a tremendously valid point. By 1:00 am there was not one but around five separate Easter eggs set to go off on April 1.
You will note I said April 2 above. I sat with the lead dev as we verified how date and time offsets worked so we didn’t have any off by one errors. Seems that some fields were zero indexed while others were one indexed. Terrible MS API. We came to consensus on what was right, we may have even tested it, and I left.
But unfortunately he had a crisis of faith an hour later and created the off by one error. Luckily for us April 1 that year was a Saturday. A lot of our users, who had internet at work, never saw the prank at all, even with the off by one error.
On Sunday the tech support emails started rolling in, and our clever little joke started to reveal itself as poor judgement. Some people got the joke, but many thought we had been hacked. By Monday we had a canned response, apologizing for our bad judgement and anyone who got freaked out thinking they got a virus, or that we did.
Three proper adults and three college seniors and nobody said stop.
Is April first the zeroth day of April or the 1st? Turns out it was the 0th.
The jokes were some ui changes. The icon spinning backward and the progress bar saying April Fool’s in rainbow text every nth page load. A bouncing logo screen saver like behavior that would wipe a window that had been idle for X minutes (restored on mouse over).
I think there was one more, but the last I remember was the lead’s idea. After four (1?) hours idle, if you had audio enabled, you would hear the lead rapping his knuckles on his monitor and saying, “Hello? Is anybody there?” That could be funny or it could be terrifying.
About three weeks earlier, the team was celebrating wrapping up a release at a reasonable hour (for once) when I uttered the words, “You know, this is the last release we are putting out before April Fools’ day.”
Everyone in earshot somehow thought this was a tremendously valid point. By 1:00 am there was not one but around five separate Easter eggs set to go off on April 1.
You will note I said April 2 above. I sat with the lead dev as we verified how date and time offsets worked so we didn’t have any off by one errors. Seems that some fields were zero indexed while others were one indexed. Terrible MS API. We came to consensus on what was right, we may have even tested it, and I left.
But unfortunately he had a crisis of faith an hour later and created the off by one error. Luckily for us April 1 that year was a Saturday. A lot of our users, who had internet at work, never saw the prank at all, even with the off by one error.
On Sunday the tech support emails started rolling in, and our clever little joke started to reveal itself as poor judgement. Some people got the joke, but many thought we had been hacked. By Monday we had a canned response, apologizing for our bad judgement and anyone who got freaked out thinking they got a virus, or that we did.
Three proper adults and three college seniors and nobody said stop.