Well, it’s April 1st again. Perhaps April Fools’ jokes and quirks are everywhere, but are they really as elegant and fun as an April Fool’s joke should be?
Probably not, but here you have a bunch of digital and tech jokes more or less from the past:
The Guardian ends with a paper — and turns into Twitter
In 2009, the Guardian announced that it would stop publishing on paper, after 188 years of ink, and from now on focus only on Twitter messages. Essentially all stories can be told with 140 characters, as was said in the case, which was published on March 31, 2009.
The author of the article?
Rio Palof, a name that could (almost) be changed to April Fools’ Day – which was also the category in which the status was marked.
He is asked if there were many who were deceived, but perhaps this news from the next day was more credible?
Warner Brothers acquires Pirate Bay
The press release sent could tell that Warner was no longer sure of winning the latest lawsuit against Pirate Bay, and therefore opted for another solution: an acquisition.
The amount was 13 billion dollars.
Who knows, maybe this is a solution that can actually work? Later in April, the founders were convicted under Swedish law, but Pirate Bay remained a thorn in the side of many for another ten years before finally closing in May 2019.
Complete YouTube – on DVD
On April 1, 2012, YouTube announced in a possibly less than credible video that they would release their entire video library on DVD. Both the idea and the video are totally silly, but of course give links to stories from the internet in the ’90s, eg about older married couples who wanted to try and therefore requested a hard copy from the internet before they decided to buy.
The video of the ad itself can of course be found on YouTube, and you can watch it here:
google nose
Maybe it was because it was Google that announced that people actually thought this was possible, maybe it was just wishful thinking, but the truth is that in 2013 Google announced that its technology to find and share scents was in beta.
The service was to be called Google Nose, and was reportedly based on a large number of “scentabytes” of data. There are no Scentabytes, of course, and it’s a pun on “smell,” the English word for scent, just in case you were wondering.
A lot of people have been fooled, probably because the Google in the video has some kind of pseudo-scientific explanation of how the new technology works. And the video you can watch here:
Windows… I mean MS-DOS phone
Windows Phone wasn’t the success Microsoft had hoped for, but they had at least some sort of self-irony about the system. In 2015, they announced that the MS-DOS phone was the next new thing.
It is uncertain how often they graze, but to this day you can actually test it out for yourself. The MS-DOS app for Windows Phone can be found here.
Harvest spaghetti and flying penguins
Asking about the classic BBC video from 1957 spaghetti harvesting It could be called digital, but it stands up to your day as one of the best April Fools’ jokes ever.
The BBC’s “sequel” from 2008 was more digital, with Terry Jones of Monty Python introducing an alleged newly discovered species of flying penguin. The recordings were digitally manipulated of course, which was apparently no small task.
The slowest internet connection ever?
Probably the best digital April Fools joke when David Weitzman published it in 1990 his suggestion Standard “IP over airlines (IPoAC)”, or internet per carrier pigeon in Norwegian.
The proposed standard was later updated in 1999, and Update It has golden grains such that the packs do not need to be transported by homing pigeons, for example ostriches have significantly better carrying capacity, but are slower and require “bridges between each field”.
It is part of history that the first attempt to test the standard in practice was made by it Bergen Linux Group 2001.
They sent out nine packages, one for each pigeon, in the form of a strip of paper that was printed and hung on the pigeon’s legs. They were then scanned on arrival with OCR software and validated. Only four packets arrived, so packet loss was just over 55 percent – largely due to user errors – and fortunately not as pictured. The reason is that someone forgot to close the cage door, so two of the pigeons escaped unpacked, and they had too few returning pigeons to be able to return the ping requests they had already received.
Speaking of ping: it ranged from about 50 minutes to about 1 hour and 45 minutes.
Of course, IPoAC has its own Wikipedia pagewhere you can see, among other things, a picture of a dead pigeon, with the caption “Example of parcel loss”.
Do you have good examples of digital April Fools jokes? Join them in the comments section!
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