> There was a program that would sort of melt your screen.
This existed for PCs, too. It was called "drip". When idle, individual characters would "drip" down your screen like raindrops, at random times, for random distances.
Another one I remember was "drain". In the very early PC days, you could add this program to the AUTOEXEC.BAT of an unsuspecting victim's computer, so that it would run at startup. It would start flashing "SYSTEM ERROR 0304-B" for a moment, then add "Water detected in disk drive A:". Another moment, then "Now draining", and it would play this gurgling sound out of the speakers (as best you could, on the speakers of the original PC). That would peter out, then "Now starting spin dry cycle", and it would play this whining sound for a bit, ramp that down, and then tell you that it was OK to use the system now.
In those days, there weren't "logins" to PCs. If you saw a PC without the normal user present, you could do anything to it.
In 6th grade I wrote a fake virus that pretended to format the hard drive and then left the user at a C:\> prompt. I left it on my moms 486DX-33 (with a turbo button) for her to find it on the weekend. Well she never turned her computers on so it promptly left my mind that evening when I went to go play at a friends house. Fast forward to Monday morning I get called to the office over the classroom PA “ooooooh grepfru_it you’re in trouuuuubleeee”. I couldn’t imagine what I did wrong. I get to the office and the principal says I have to urgently call my mom. So I dial the home number and my mom is frantic on the phone “GREPFRU_IT MY COMPUTER ERASED ITSELF FROM A VIRUS! I TOLD YOU NEVER TO INSTALL GAMES ON IT”. Thinking: the last game I installed was a month ago. Then it clicked my fake virus. I laughed so hard I started crying. The principal and school administrators looking at me like I was crazy. I told my mom to eject the floppy disk and restart the computer. She immediately started laughing when she realized she didn’t check if a disk was in the drive. She said never do that again and hung up on me. I couldn’t stop laughing all the way back to class — to which I then pretended like I was getting suspended for getting into a fight (the whole class knew I was lying about that one though)
If I recall correctly, the drive light stayed on, the drive was spinning, but the whine came from the speakers, and moved to a higher pitch partway through. It also smoothly ramped down in "RPM" (frequency) at the end, which is not a thing that the floppies could do.
We had some Apollo Domain machines at school which could also run similar programs - I remember 'Crumble' and 'Melt' being two of them. And you could run them on other peoples' display. So we used to melt/crumble the screens of the engineering students in the next lab over. 'We' in this case had admin privileges, though, and only did it a couple of times.
If someone xhosted my machine I would run xmeltdown back to their display. I wrote in another post in the thread about how and why someone would xhost my machine.
There was a program that would sort of melt your screen.
There was another one that would animate a little character at the bottom who would then push your desktop off the side of the screen.
and there was a way to take all the workstations in the group, and play sounds on them.
So (nearest I can vaguely recall):
sunos came with sound files for laughter and applause, and it was amusing to have all the machines in the group laugh or applaud like a crowd.(well it was amusing the first few times anyway...)