Show us a great April Fools' Day joke.

I'm not a big one for practical jokes.  In Robert Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, humor is codified, for the sake of an intelligent computer's understanding, as "Funny Once", "Funny Always", and "Funny Never". Some things are funny only the first time, some are always funny no matter what, and some things just aren't funny at all.  For me, practical jokes usually fall in the "Funny Once" category, although if they're mean-spirited or cause stress for the person being pranked, they immediately go in the "Funny Never" bucket.

 

WARNING: The rest of this post is sort of geeky.  If you don't consider yourself kind of geeky, you may find it funny.

That being said, I do appreciate when an April Fool's joke doesn't harm anyone AND manages to be "Funny Always".  One example that I recall is when a former boss of mine sent me some cut-sheets for some new electrical components he was thinking of buying, and asked me to review and provide my input.

Write Only Memory (1/2)Write Only Memory (2/2)

Yes, these are cut-sheets for "Write Only Memory".  Just as you'd infer, where "Read Only Memory" devices have data on it that can only be read (and not written to), "Write Only Memory" devices can only be written to (and not read from).  Some of the uses suggested on the cut sheet for Write Only Memory:

  • Don't Care Buffer Stores
  • Least Significant Control Memories
  • First-In, Never-Out (FINO) Asynchronous Buffers
  • Post-Mortem Memories (Weapons Systems)

 

It took me a little while to figure out what the hell the stuff was supposed to be, but I chuckled quite a bit as I started reading the descriptions and looking at all the hard work that was put into these cut sheets.

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