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My high school used The Print Shop to make a lot of signage. Having an eye for fonts and a computer and printer at home made it easy to produce fake signs that appeared superficially to be whatever sign I was replacing. "ALL LOCKERS ARE SCHOOL PROPERTY AND MAY BE SEARCHED AT ANY TIME" was easy to change into "ALL THOUGHTS ARE SCHOOL PROPERTY AND MAY BE CONTROLLED AT ANY TIME", etc.

Not having a laminator lowered my success rate at keeping fake signs up, but just putting up new copies worked well until I got caught in the act.

Aside: Anybody remember the Easter Egg game hidden in the Apple II version (and maybe others) of The Print Shop Companion?



Yes, DRIVER!! That was the best Easter Egg. You can play it here [1], Escape Control+6 after booting.

I loved that game so much as a kid. I made a clone of it as an entry to the IOCCC which won [2]. Sadly it no longer works in modern terminal emulators, but a slight modification [3] fixes it. Instructions here [4].

Aside, I got up to similar shenanigans in high school. Printed out "Y2K Compliant" stickers and stuck them on everything. My mother was a teacher so I did have access to a laminator ;) a privilege I left sadly underused.

[1] https://archive.org/details/328_Print_Shop_Companion_Side_B

[2] https://www.ioccc.org/years.html#2001_ctk

[3] https://chris.pacejo.net/programs/ctk-fixed.c

[4] http://www.ioccc.org/2001/ctk.hint


Roland Gustafsson here: I had forgotten that I added that Easter egg! Yeah, that game was something I wrote for fun and just threw it in there. Every program I worked on back in the day had at least one Easter egg. Usually many!


Also, it was only the Apple II version that had Easter Eggs, even though I ported the C64 and Atari versions myself, that was my first experience with those machines so didn't have time to play around. I did the ports in record time, however, due to my abstracting all "system stuff" for the Apple II version, saved so much time with the others, didn't hurt that they were also 6502, however. :) I did not port the PC version.


Nice to meet you, thanks for the reply! I'll have to try to find the others :)


I remember fondly "Roland was here but he left". I learned so much from studying your programs!


Oh, wow. This is one of the reasons I love Hacker News.

Thanks for stopping by and commenting!


"It was as he suspected: in a rigid hierarchy, nobody questions orders that seem to come from above, and those at the very top are so isolated from the actual work situation that they never see what is going on below. It was the chains of communication, not the means of production, that determined a social process.. Nothing signed “THE MGT.” would ever be challenged; the Midget could always pass himself off as the Management."


I solved a shared lunchroom problem with a Brother labeler, using the same wide yellow labels that someone in the office used.

"NO MICROWAVING FISH"




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