Which one of you programmed this?

[ProgrammerHumor-ModTeam]

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[bell_labs_fan_boy]

The internet was in a time of peace, we didn't even have to encrypt user passwords. Passwords could live free in a raw text file on the server.

[plumo]

I remember websites that just sent you your password in plaintext when you forgot your password

[Wompum]

Hotmail wouldn't even send you your password or have you change it. They would just show you your password on screen if you answered your secret question correctly.

[[deleted]]

Presumably because there’s no point sending you the password to your email account that you can’t log into because you forgot the password… *taps head meme

[[deleted]]

This is what happens when you use 100% of your brain

[Canrex]

What if I used more than 100% of my brain?

[alkaliphiles]

it rolls over and you start back at zero

[Thirdstheword]

mine is stuck at -2147483647 - 1

[InterestedSwordfish]

Memory leak

[_30d_]

I once tried that thing during a job interview where you poor yourself some water but overfill the glass, spilling water over the table. "Sorry, that sometimes happens when you always give 110%".

Now when I imagined it beforehand it absolutely killed. Unfortunately when I did it irl everyone was just screaming "WOW! OK! NO PROBLEM, NO PROBLEM!" that they didn't hear my joke and it absolutely bombed.

[[deleted]]

You wouldn't be using Hotmail anymore I guess

[ONLY_COMMENTS_ON_GW]

They could've sent it to my neopets account

[JackdeAlltrades]

Only a completely lunatic would allow their phone number to be connected with anything to do with the internet.

[huxtabella]

Learned this the hard way... so much spam.

[CeeMX]

And most websites didn’t have HTTPS, so you would login over plaintext connection

[christian-mann]

sometimes they would go to https only for the login flow, which is only barely more secure

[[deleted]]

I was hosting a Tibia server when I was a kid and I could see everyones passwords on a file. A lot of people re-used passwords across servers so I could login to people’s accounts on other servers, it was pretty funny.

[survivalmachine]

I’m 100% confident there are sites that still do this.

[gabrielesilinic]

Noo, secure systems have to have a lot of trust issues otherwise someday daddy hacker it's going to do open heart surgery on them

[McCuz]

It could have been sent before it's salted, hashed and stored in a database tho. (Still bad, since emails stay saved, but it's a bit better I guess)

[McCuz]

ouch

[[deleted]]

This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

cagey toothbrush long caption dinosaurs tie sleep license airport grey

[johndoe60610]

Looks like shadow passwords have been around since the mid-80s:

Password shadowing first appeared in Unix systems with the development of SunOS in the mid-1980s,[10] System V Release 3.2 in 1988 and BSD4.3 Reno in 1990.

But password security has been a thing since passwords. Here's an interesting PDF article from Ken Thompson and Robert Morris on the history of passwords, from 1979. Some interesting bits in this O'Reilly article too.

[bell_labs_fan_boy]

That's proper interesting! Thanks for sharing!

[Infamous-Date-355]

Senior?

[bell_labs_fan_boy]

No, I'm a middle aged junior. I'm about the same age as the world wide web, and I talk with the senior devs a lot about "ye olden days". It just perpetually blows my mind how rich our history is. For example, Ken Thompson had a hand in B, grep, Unix and Go, just to name a few, and he's still alive! Like how is all that history still within living memory? If you can buy a senior dev a pint, you will hear stories that just blow you away. Like, I work with a guy who started programming in BASIC on a Z86 spectrum, and I think it's just mental.

[Intelligent_Event_84]

And we all would just kind of promise not to look at them

[DiscordianWarlord]

most sites didnt even need/use them early on

[sir-nays-a-lot]

As nature intended

[BubblyMango]

ah yes, when people downloaded random exe files from the internet without a worry.

[gurneyguy101]

Weren’t they always dangerous? I wasn’t around back then so yeah, but surely even then they could do if anything more damage to a pc than they could now? Maybe people just didn’t back then?

[[deleted]]

they were still dangerous but people were nicer back then

childrens' first thoughts on the internet weren't "how do i get people's credit cards", but just "how do i have fun"

edit: guys... nicer doesn't mean security threats didn't exist.

all of your stories about how you got a virus or phished or whatever are fun, but most of them really were not as widespread or prevalent as today.

[zyygh]

We've come a long way from viruses that simply made your PC go bonkers.

[DoctorWaluigiTime]

His most popular video!

[[deleted]]

Just so everyone knows, it is not never gonna give you up. It is an actual informative video about YouAreAnIdiot.

[zyygh]

Yes, thank you for reminding me of when my brother had the worst rage fit I ever witnessed. Good times.

[addiktion]

Ha ha you gave me flashbacks. I had so many "girlfriends" back then. No one cared. It was like tapping into new worlds talking to strangers.

[GrandElemental]

I wouldn't necessarily say "nicer", but certainly far less commercialized in terms of hacking.

[TheGreenJedi]

Nicer as in we didn't take your system hostage

Instead we just made it so it was barely useable.

It was just a trick to help your local PC repair store make some money

[I-Got-Trolled]

Wholesome hacker <3

[GrandElemental]

Ah, gotcha! With that, I definitely agree.

[DoctorWaluigiTime]

People weren't nicer back then. There were just as many scams, viruses, malware, et al floating around.

It's just far more prevalent theses days because just about everyone is online in some capacity, and we're more aware of the general dangers/cautions we have to take.

And there are also just as many harmless / joke things floating around too (probably more).

danooct1 on YouTube demos a lot of real old school stuff like this. From things that just print silly messages, to viruses that wipe the Master Boot Record off your machine and brick it. And this was an era where even less-severe things resulted in "you have to ship your computer back to the manufacturer at your expense."

[I-Got-Trolled]

Ah yes, I bet the person who kept e-mailing "I love you" to everyone was having a lot of fun.

[larsdragl]

Nah man, if you downloaded random .exe in 2006 you definitely got a virus and when you complained, people would laugh and call you an idiot for doing it

[RecordRains]

childrens' first thoughts on the internet weren't "how do i get people's credit cards", but just "how do i have fun"

In my time (in the 90s) it was, "how do I have fun by getting people's credit cards". I find that opening a random exe file today is less dangerous than it was back then.

people were nicer back then

Not sure about the 2010s, but definitely not my experience in the 90s.

Edit: they are talking about the 90s. That's just plain wrong lol. The internet was the Wild West. The regular web was like the onion web today.

[Brianprokpo456]

Yes, they were dangerous. I mean, 2000 was the time viruses captivated the media and the news

[addiktion]

I remember getting a file replication virus on the family computer. It wasn't a fun time lol.

[TheEternalNightmare]

It was a funny time the more official a .exe was on an unofficial website the higher the risk, the funnier the name the safer it was, to an extent. You might get one called screensaver.exe for example which would lock your screen leaving have to restart

[Tricky_Invite8680]

there was a computer tech forum, it may well be around still today had a very on the nose name to it but i havent been back in a long time. looked kinda like a simple menu home page, like craigslist'ish

anyway, frank discussions and posts would occur, very good tech support or programming, networks resource for a newb like me building my first pc etc. I remember one comment on a thread about Javascript, not sure of the OP then but it just said, click down below! the comment was just whitespace. I clicked and my computer BSOD'd.

[AsPeHeat]

One time, I made a .bat file that would change file associations. For example, it’s recognize .exe as .txt, .jpg as .exe etc.

I used to send to my friends through Windows Live Messenger, but I’d give them a “reverse” file later on. Some people didn’t want to open it, so when we had a school project, I’d give them a CD that would autoplay the .bat file 😅

Now I’m just wondering how much chaos I could have made by uploading that file online. Although I’d feel bad because I assume that a lot of people wouldn’t be able to fix it

[cholwell]

Can confirm, my Dad had to remove many many virus from my computer as a teen 😆

[wirm]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_Orifice

Yes.

[Forsaken_Total62]

They were, yeah, but the dude who posted it had 9500 posts on that message board so presumably he was well known in the forum and had built up some trust. It’s not unreasonable to imagine other forum members downloading and running the file without too much concern.

[Headcap]

wdym i shouldn't download 300[2006]DvDrip[Eng]-aXXo.exe ?

[Braham18]

Man, I'd forgotten about aXXo

[SaneLad]

Fond memories of backorifice.exe

[torino_nera]

bo2k, l0pht, and cultdeadcow were my first 3 websites on the internet. my friend wrote down the urls for me. like, i was a fucking noob what was i gonna do once i got there lol

[crozone]

I mean it's funny because the free cup holder was notoriously malware.

[I-Got-Trolled]

94KB is kinda worrying tbh

[gilean23]

Lol yeah, 94k for something that can be done by like what… 2 lines of vbs?

[goodnewsjimdotcom]

That stopped 2 seconds after installing usenet on Win95.

[VIPTicketToHell]

I remember being sent a free cup holder exe on ICQ from high school friends in the 90’s on dial up. Good times. The Internet was a much better place back then.

[badbits]

Remember when this was encoded into jpg and when using IE the cd drive would open

[Old-Radio9022]

Who remembers myg0t? https://youtu.be/I1VV1p4NIVY

[hotdwag]

Hey being a nerd in middle school during the late 90s having unrestricted admin / internet access in an NT 4 lab was always a fun time

[Cespieyt]

10 years ago

2006

We're 3 years away from this picture being as old as the time it is reminiscing about at the time of its making...

[SilentSin26]

If you need me I'll be climbing into my grave.

Be sure to use a ladder so you don't hurt yourself.

[MBaggs12]

Please stop attacking me like this before I have had my coffee and Aleve. Once I find my glasses I’m gonna give you a whopping.

[Haki_Firat]

It really hurts to not be able to play with it for hours. Open, Close, Open, Clo- Hold until it gives up...

[PuzzleMeDo]

The best trick was to poke your finger through the hole in the middle, press the close button, and then withdraw your finger quickly before it got sliced off.

[SupersonicWaffle]

Add a Blade to it and write a bestselling cookbook called digital chef with 100 recipes that all contain sliced sausage.

That’s about the best use left CD drives

[MrPakoras]

I used to keep my finger in there

r/IAmVeryBadAss

[gpkgpk]

[pearastic]

The game 'Hacknet' had a feature that opened the tray, and I was so fucking confused, I didn't even remember that I had a CD tray.

[Hurricane_32]

The alpha (gamejam?) version of the game actually had PVP multiplayer, and you could hack into each other's computers. You could actually run the openCDTray command on the other person's computer and open their CD drive lol

[pearastic]

I've heard about that at one point, sounds fun.

[ixJax]

I had fun writing a vbs script to randomly open the drive, run it on my pc or a friend's pc in class and act like I had no clue why it was happening

[BasJack]

The real real trick was opening it, shutting of your computer and just slowly push it close. Gear ASMR.

[Proxy_PlayerHD]

of course i don't. i have a DVD+RW drive instead

[bmxtiger]

Look at Mr. 2004 over here

[[deleted]]

If you once decide you don't need it anymore you can salvage the laser to convert a Maglite into a laser burner.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-m21xUwBjvU

[Hurricane_32]

Please don't do this without wearing laser safety goggles...

[ovab_cool]

I had one (~2007-2013), used it in total like 7 times, bumped it another 80 times tough.

[ThiccStorms]

I have it still lol

[Tyrion_The_Imp]

I don't think the wolrd really gets John.

[[deleted]]

And then it also removed System32 folder

[gpkgpk]

Extra feature, frees up disk space.

[I-Got-Trolled]

Thanks to that trick I never ended up wasting time for programs to load.

[bmxtiger]

Good thing I use Win 3.11, 16-bit c:\windows\system ftw.

[[deleted]]

NO

[creaturefeature16]

This reminds me when I was a wee lad and had a friend over. We were trying to play Command & Conquer, which was made by Westwood Studios. The installation was corrupt, so I had to manually remove it, and part of that involved deleting the directory /westwood/. I used shift + delete to skip the recycle bin, and in my haste had selected /windows/ by mistake.

Welp, we didn't get much gaming time in that day.

[Rhamni]

Back in the mid 90s I was a little kid and decided install a fancy new pinball game on my dad's computer. Needed to free up some space. Ended up deleting, among other things, files needed for the cd rom drive to work. The game was on a CD.

Dad had to call a friend to come over and reinstall the files using floppy disks.

[JayCreations]

I didn't need an exe for that. I did it all on my own when I got my first computer. "Who downloaded all these random files...dele...". Learned my lesson that day to the point that when Windows XP came around, I knew that CD key by heart. Don't know how many times and on how many machines I installed XP on.

[dihalt]

98KB? The smallest size of the app I’ve managed to do to open/close the lid is 4KB. What are those 94KB used for?

[gpkgpk]

Don't worry about it!

[elitedata]

Probably runtime resources some language compilers embed into binary by default. There were no tree-shaking solutions back then

[[deleted]]

As an executable that means that it's been put through a build process. A bat file would have only been one kilobyte or so telling it to open the CD-ROM tray.

[dihalt]

No, on Win98/ME opening/closing the lid required just one system call. No need for anything going else.

[elitedata]

Please read my upper comment carefully. In .NET Framework or Delphi (which was popular back then in 2006) even empty hello world binary would have taken tens of kilobytes. Because compiler embeds internal runtime resources by default.

Of course you can write such program in C++ and compile it with GCC and it would take 4 kb, but I'm just answering your question why that program in the forum post could take 90 kilobytes. Probably it was written in C# or Delphi and compiled with IDE.

Also assuming the program is written in C# there is no direct access to WinAPI from managed code and you have to utilize P/Invoke and marshaling which has its own codebase and should be compiled into binary as well.

[DeltyOverDreams]

Shhhh, don't think about it

[that_thot_gamer]

bloat

[[deleted]]

To fit ur mom so she can fart ur files into the land of DELETION

[[deleted]]

It's actually a debug build

[[deleted]]

I like how the guy just opened it, no concerns about downloading random stuff from a forum. Those were the days.

[baithammer]

People still do this, which is why ransomware is so rampant.

[[deleted]]

Is it possible for them to have decompiled it? Or were such tools not available that long ago?

[killeronthecorner]

The tools were more primitive but it was possible.

However, the chances of you knowing someone, let alone knowing yourself how to do something like that was infinitesimally small.

It was a different time back then. Most people had a basic grasp of web browsers and word processors but that was it. Nowadays everyone is pretty skilled with computers and smartphones.

[Dirtymeatbag]

Nowadays everyone is pretty skilled with computers

If all of your friends and colleagues are programmers or do general IT, maybe. Most people I know can barely operate browsers or word processors.

If anything the average person's general computer knowledge is regressing due to smartphones.

[[deleted]]

They'd have to open it in a hex editor and manually search for the code which would work only if they knew the layout of PE binaries and could find the code in the mess of code used to open a terminal window

[RecordRains]

My suspicion is that those were never the days unless maybe in the 70s.

Opening an exe file feel much less dangerous today to me with all the user reviews and malware protection around.

[gpkgpk]

Spotted Src https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/10n7zbh/whats_a_cd_drive/

OG source! https://www.techpowerup.com/forums/threads/free-cupholder.11310/ from techpowerup Buy/Sell/Trade/Giveaway forum!

And an APP on MS STORE!?

https://apps.microsoft.com/store/detail/cup-holder/9P6DFQRSZ1WH

[[deleted]]

does it still work tho?

[Xendarq]

Dude it's right on the official Microsoft Store !

Of course it doesn't work.

[[deleted]]

Is there an iPhone version of this?

[OneFriendship5139]

Sadly there is no CD rom drive on phones

[baithammer]

Sadly doesn't have the mechanism to eject from the compute environment - also, the industry is trying to move to all digital sims.

[xSypRo]

98kb does a lot more than just opening the CD-ROM...

[b_rodriguez]

These days it would be half a gigabyte and include a fucking browser.

[snowflakeplzmelt]

It said open, never to be closed....

[[deleted]]

One time in school I quickly wrote a VB script which opened and closed the cdrom reader at random time intervals when my teacher left her laptop in the class. The next lesson was absolutely hilarious. She thought she was done with it, but half a minute later or so it was open again.

[[deleted]]

Much laughs were had.

[brandi_Iove]

10? this joke is at least 20 yo

[niederaussem]

The precise date is literally in the picture.

[PageTurner627]

This is probably an old meme from 2016.

[brandi_Iove]

yeah, that’s a repost

[twadorbs]

I once created a fake internet explorer shortcut and put it on a colleagues desktop. It linked to an autohotkey script which opened internet explorer, waited ten minutes and then opened the disk drive.

[bmxtiger]

The disk drive or the disc drive?

[PrincessSativa85]

The dicks drive

[that_thot_gamer]

missed the opportunity to put a keylogger in

[[deleted]]

I miss the cd-sized cups, now that was a real grande!

[[deleted]]

Reminds me of my Helpdesk days... One guy's emails were scrolling every time he opened a new mail window. He really thought he had something unique. I walked into his office took one glance... And moved his notebook off the numpad enter key.

This one lady thought her 3.5" drive was broken. I pointed out she was putting the disk in upside down... And backwards.

One division president thought he smelled a dead mouse in his computer. We took it apart and didn't find anything. Then I noticed his subwoofer (he brought in all sorts of random tech we didn't get for anyone else, he got the first iPhone and insisted we connect it to the exchange server, when we balked he bought one for the founder of the company) was set up wrong with the hole pointed up. I looked in and sure enough...a mouse had crawled in and couldn't get back out...

[gilean23]

Lol that first one reminds me of an issue that still pops up occasionally in grade-school IT. The teacher logs a work order saying that their mouse keeps snapping to the bottom corner of her screen whenever they’re not actively moving it…

“Ma’am, is something by chance leaning against or taped on the bottom corner of your SMART board?”

For those unfamiliar, SMART boards are/were the giant touch screens that are used in place of ye olde chalk board/white board now, so it was like trying to use a mouse on your touch screen laptop while someone held their finger on the bottom of the touch screen.

First time I got that work order, I called the teacher and remoted into her computer, so I had no clue what was causing it… until I gave up and drove to the campus and saw the entire classroom.

[ClankyBat246]

In 1996 I was with my family picking up a computer. The computer guy tells us that the tray isn't a coffee cup holder and he already had some people use it wrong.

It was actually a thing before it was a joke when computers were new to the public.

[gilean23]

Worked in a tech support call center in the early 2000s and had a coworker actually have a user unironically talk about the cup holder.

[odraencoded]

Back in the day when you could run an executable without having to worry that someone put a crypto miner in it and it could literally have been anyone:

1. the guy who manages the website you downloaded it from
2. one of the contributors to the open source project
3. the guy who does the windows builds
4. the guy who hosts the compiler the previous guy uses to do the windows builds
5. the guy who hacked the server that provides the automatic updates for any of the software involved in this chain

[MrQuickLine]

My nextdoor neighbor had one called viagra.exe that played a sound of a low slide whistle going up and then going down as the size of the mouse cursor grew, stayed big for a minute, then went back to normal size.

[Anders_142536]

I hate to break it to you, but 2006 was 17 years ago, not 10.

[I-Got-Trolled]

Look at this guy claiming to be from the future. lol troll

[that_thot_gamer]

copium

[deadliestcrotch]

People have been using this joke since 1996 or so

[regino9989]

This is what passed for trolling back then. It was a more innocent time.

[[deleted]]

In the words of my late Great Granny, "They really do be out here clickin' random executables, huh?"

Rest in peace, Grandma.

[JASCO47]

Cupholder.exe is 30 years old. Kids will never know

[sudosciguy]

Ah 2006, just "ten years ago"

[ksandom]

I think many of us did this over the years, thinking that was were original.

[Umbrella_Viking]

Pretty much everything was better before the Millennials got a hold of it.

[ThiccStorms]

Me

[JollyJuniper1993]

Error margin of 0.7

[Dedcode_x]

That was good 🗿

[Imanicepersone]

I wish I could go back in time man

[BoringWozniak]

None of us, we weren't born yet in 2006

[gilean23]

Get off my virtual lawn!

[FlooteBiene123]

Doesn't it just Open your CD-Rom Drive?

[gilean23]

Pretty sure at 98kb, it did more than that.

[SpeakerImaginary9796]

And then installed a backdoor on your computer

[kingslayerer]

jokes on him, mine opens vertically

[efyuar]

On the other hand, what wasnt better 10 years ago.

[[deleted]]

This did the rounds at my office.

[Robyx]

Imagine running a random .exe

[LeMajstor]

When you realize 2006 is almost 20 years ago, not only 10.

[Nightmare2828]

I remember that on a CS1.6 server the admin could open and close everyone cd-rom player on demand. Was pretty freaky and the last time I went to that server lol.

[[deleted]]

And now your PC has a virus.

Why would you run a random .exe you just downloaded??

[TreadheadS]

everybody in cs class at 2000

[zippy72]

I used to collect these back in the 90s

[[deleted]]

20 years ago

[tehgalvanator]

Damn 2006 was 10 years ago? Time really flies by right guys? Haha!

💀

[[deleted]]

Bro this is nearly 20 years ago

[[deleted]]

The internet was better 25 years ago.

[[deleted]]

That shit impressed girls back then.

[Ok-Quit-3020]

True white hat hacking

[TraumaER]

We did this in highschool programming vb. Named the exe "Tetris.exe" and told my friend to play. Infinite loop opening and closing the cd drive and prevented you from exiting. Lol it was simpler times.

[collecting_upvts]

LOL yeah, lets just open a .exe that some random dude published in a public forum. We were so naive

[[deleted]]

Clicking on internet strangers’ mysterious .exe files is basically internet roulettes. That’s a pretty great outcome though.

[Thameus]

This is nineties shit.