april fool by Rachel Smith
posted 1 Apr ’08, 8.31am PDT PST on flickr

16 years ago today…

I was in Libreville, Gabon, wrapping up four months as an intern with the Peace Corps. My job was to set up the computer network (Appletalk) in the main office, help the staff convert from a paper-based forms process to a computer-based one–this involved creating a lot of custom forms in FoxBase–and teach them how to use everything from word processing software to Hypercard.

For April fool’s day, I created a custom Hypercard stack and set it up on every single computer the night before so that when the computers were turned on in the morning, the only thing that would launch would be my stack, with the first card (top image) showing. Of course, if you looked hard enough, it was obvious that Hypercard was running, but most people just read the “error” text. When they clicked OK, they got the next card in the stack (bottom image), and then if they followed along through, there were some jokes and animations. I printed out screen shots of the stack and pasted them into my sketchbook, which is how I am able to share them with the world now.

I suppose it’s not surprising that most people didn’t think it was funny. So, if anyone from PC Libreville sees this, happy April Fool’s Day! I hope you can laugh at it now :-)