April 1st is here again this year, so let's take a look at the best technology-themed or technology-assisted April Fools' Day pranks.
Harvesting spaghetti from trees
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVo_wkxH9dU
The news came on 1 April 1957 from the BBC's most serious news department and was addressed to an equally rigid audience with a particular sense of humour, the British.
The BCC's respected news program "Panorama" aired an unusual agricultural story: It showed footage of Swiss farm workers picking spaghetti from trees, reporting the eradication of the "spaghetti weevil", allowing for a booming pasta harvest.
It sounds ridiculous to you, but consider that 1957 was a time when this Italian dish was not widely consumed in the UK and some Brits did not know that spaghetti is pasta made from wheat flour and water.
Hundreds of viewers phoned the BBC to ask for details, with some even asking how to grow their own spaghetti trees. Decades later CNN called this broadcast "the biggest hoax ever pulled by any credible news organization."
This was also the BCC's first fake news which started a tradition of fake news every April Fool's Day, occasionally showing Big Ben being replaced with a digital one clock, an astronomer's claim that a planetary alignment would weaken Earth's gravitational pull, allowing humans to jump very high, and many other feats.
Migrating flying penguins
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dfWzp7rYR4
The team behind the BBC documentaries have wowed audiences around the world with stunning images of nature, taking viewers to the ends of the Earth to see sights that no one has ever seen before.
And in 2008 the BBC presented evidence of an exciting new step in evolution: A newly discovered colony of flying penguins, migrating by the thousands kilometers from Antarctica to enjoy the local climates of a rainforest.
The movie clip was a clever piece of computer animation. It could have been more believable if the presenter of the film was not Terry Jones of the legendary comedy group Monty Python.
Telepathic Google searches
Google also joined the April Fool's dance citing 2000 for the newly invented Mentalplex technology, a search engine that actually reads your mind when you want to search for something.
The instructions for use are very simple:
- Remove hat and glasses.
- Look in the MentalPlex circle. Don't shake your head.
- Think in your mind the image of what you want to find.
- Click or visualize clicking on the MentalPlex circle.
- See the answers to your search. So simple. Well done, Bing!
Their page is still working. You can see her here.
Make your TV color instantly
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QlcBrC2obFE
Imagine living in 1964, having the financial comfort of owning a black-and-white television, and learning that by using a common item found around the house, namely, simple women's nylon stockings, you can cover the screen your and so you will see your favorite shows in color!
On April 1, 1962, Sweden's Sveriges Television hosted a "technical expert" who offered viewers a way to turn their black-and-white televisions into color: put a nylon stocking over the screen so that the prismatic properties of the nylon mesh it will refract the light waves the right way (although they added that you'll have to move your head back and forth to get the right effect). How many socks were destroyed by optimistic Swedish viewers?
Watch the demo in the video above. Even if you don't speak Swedish, you can probably feel the urge to do the experiment.
Don't drink while surfing
The internet was still in its infancy in 1994, so it's not surprising that people believed a column by John Dvorak of PC Computing magazine about a Senate bill of USA που θα απαγόρευε την οδήγηση σε κατάσταση μέθης στον υπό construction information highway.
"Congress apparently thinks that being drunk on a highway is bad, no matter what kind of highway," wrote Dvorak. So you can't be drunk and surf the information highway! The phones on Capitol Hill were buzzing, but luckily for netizens, it was all an April Fool's joke.
iGuru
We confess that although we are lovers of the truth and abhor lies, distortions of the truth, hoaxes and anything that is not open source, and we do not participate in this "festival", we have done some cute articles for the sake of custom on April 1st (only).
But another joke and another lie, even with the subsequent declaration of honesty.
