Was this a fantastic prank?

[Gingerbread Demon]

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The basics of this is some guy owned a BBC Micro computer and when left idle the computer presented messages on the screen and some kind of communication was going on. I watched the whole thing and I came to the conclusion this was either a really well thought out hoax, or some kind of prank, and I am leaning towards prank, or bullshit upon watching this.

 

[Miss Chicken]

I am not sure about how easy it was to hack a computer back in the 1980s so I cannot say what really happened in this case. I am 100% certain it was not a ghost of a medieval guy.

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

I am not sure about how easy it was to hack a computer back in the 1980s so I cannot say what really happened in this case. I am 100% certain it was not a ghost of a medieval guy.

The BBC Micro had a number of empty ROM slots on the mainboard where option ROM chips could be installed to do various things. I'm leaning towards that kind of thing going on here.

 

[Non Sync]

There were a number of gag programs that would just run in the background until triggered. There was one that would have random letters drop to the bottom of the screen until they were all lined up on the bottom row. I liked one were you had your "c:\" prompt and when you started to type, a beeping alarm would sound, and a message displayed "Water detected in drive a:. Draining drive.", audio played simulating water draining, and then the disk drive would spin and "Spin drying drive" would appear.

 

[Locutus of Bored]

Let me see, an economics professor who is writing a book needs a hook to drive up book sales, so he concocts a story about ghosts from the sixteenth century and time travelers from 2109 leaving messages on his computer to create a compelling mystery.

Or, actual ghost from the sixteenth century takes Learning Annex course in mind-80s computer programming and decides to help some rando sell books by leaving anachronistic messages on his computer while he gets wasted at the pub.

Which one is more likely?

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

There were a number of gag programs that would just run in the background until triggered. There was one that would have random letters drop to the bottom of the screen until they were all lined up on the bottom row. I liked one were you had your "c:\" prompt and when you started to type, a beeping alarm would sound, and a message displayed "Water detected in drive a:. Draining drive.", audio played simulating water draining, and then the disk drive would spin and "Spin drying drive" would appear.

Oh that sounds like fun. I'd never heard of those.

Let me see, an economics professor who is writing a book needs a hook to drive up book sales, so he concocts a story about ghosts from the sixteenth century and time travelers from 2109 leaving messages on his computer to create a compelling mystery.

Or, actual ghost from the sixteenth century takes Learning Annex course in mind-80s computer programming and decides to help some rando sell books by leaving anachronistic messages on his computer while he gets wasted at the pub.

Which one is more likely?

Of course it's all made up, but in terms of a prank having that machine with an extra ROM in one of the option slots that triggers under some kind of timer also seems possible, but yeah the whole thing sounds totally made up.

 

[Non Sync]

Oh that sounds like fun. I'd never heard of those.

The pack rat that I am, I probably have copies of them on a floppy disk.

 

[Avro Arrow]

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I don't know about the subject at hand, but trying to get us to watch a 43 minute video in order to have the knowledge to comment on the thread was a pretty good prank!

 

[Gingerbread Demon]

I don't know about the subject at hand, but trying to get us to watch a 43 minute video in order to have the knowledge to comment on the thread was a pretty good prank!

I just find stories like this fascinating. I'm not at all a believer that anything spooky or supernatural was going on here, it's either a very elaborate technical prank or a bunch of bullshit that was used to sell a book, and I'm leaning towards the latter. When I posted the video that was the first time I had seen that video myself, though I did know about the story and even then thought it was a bunch of codswollop.