when i was at school maybe age 6 there was a computer running win95 in the corridor between classrooms. every time me or my friend were excused from class to go to the toilet we'd play around on it for a few minutes. i think at one point one of us opened a browser or software with a message "your computer is not connected to The Internet"
our parents were called in. this was a serious incident - a potential crime. we "had been Hacking the computer and had managed to connect it to The Internet"
@envgen i bet the teachers did. i didn't because i was a smart big brain boy
@jk @envgen back when I was a kid i had a spectrum 128K +2 and I had a cover tape off a magazine that had a game called Butch Hard Guy and if you died in that game it brought up a screen saying that it would self destruct if the timer got to zero and you didn't press any button to continue.
I genuinely got anxiety that it would break my Spectrum if I didn't so any time I wanted to stop playing after I died, I'd press to continue then hit the reset button.
@jk @envgen I love that computers have various things like this, like "lp0 on fire", HCF, Pentium F00F, Cyrix Coma, "Not a Typewriter" and other weird errors and terminology, but I also hate that NONE of them go the distance and physically destroy the hardware.
but also I love that there isn't something that can physically and irrevocably destroy the hardware. ^^;
Like a lot of the Killer Pokes either knocked drive heads out of alignment (eventually), or MIGHT cause damage. no guarantees.
@Nine @envgen i bet you could damage a ton of pre-multisync old-style dumb computer monitors by outputting the wrong signals actually, so it just depends on whether the hardware lets you configure that in software. like maybe even xrandr modelines could do it