What The Flock Are Ewe Doing?!

Back in the early 1990s, I worked at a European science institute developing software. The institute had just purchased a set of powerful, state-of-the-art Silicon Graphics workstations and had set them up in a computing lab.

A group of us working on them discovered that it was possible to write a script that played a sound remotely on a terminal at a set time, so that somebody quietly coding away in an otherwise empty room would suddenly hear a loud belch even though nobody else was present.

Things got out of hand when one of my colleagues refined the script to loop around random computers in the room playing a sound. They uploaded a set of sheep noises and primed the script.

Unfortunately, there was a surprise visit to the computer room from the head of the institute and a number of VIPs. Just as the head was extolling the new computer facilities and the high-quality science they would facilitate, first one and then another of the computers started “baaing” loudly until the whole room was bleating like a flock of demented, angry sheep.

The demonstration had to be redone, and security on the workstations was tightened very soon afterward.