'C:\> FORMAT C:' – relax, it's just a screen saver

View article

62 points by TheIncredibleCh 11 hours ago on hackernews | 53 comments

numpad0 | 9 hours ago

gives me SSL_ERROR_INTERNAL_ERROR_ALERT on Firefox

thehamkercat | 9 hours ago

same on Chrome, maybe it's real DOS

: tosti | 8 hours ago
DOS has been DoS'd
: RedShift1 | 7 hours ago
Doesn't work for me either.

Bengalilol | 9 hours ago

I was site visitor 0001101 (hit return).

I will get back until counter reaches 01000110 01010010 01001101 01000001 01010100 00100000 01000011 00111010

: teddyh | 6 hours ago
I think you mean 01000110 01001111 01010010 01001101 01000001 01010100 00100000 01000011 00111010

hdgvhicv | 9 hours ago

32768MB of ram?

Yeah, that’s wrong.

: trollbridge | 8 hours ago
FP4 vs FP8 strikes again…
: [OP] TheIncredibleCh | 8 hours ago
Thanks for the hint, and very old bug from the beginning, forgotten in space and time....
Fixed!

qubex | 9 hours ago

You couldn’t run a format command when within the disk you were trying to format. You’d need to (for example) cd A: and then format c:.

Deltree, on the other hand…

foobarian | 8 hours ago

There was a secret option at one point 'FORMAT C: /AUTOTEST'

stuaxo | 8 hours ago

The favourite of naughty kids in computer shops with Windows 95

: qubex | 7 hours ago
Yup.

JdeBP | 3 hours ago

You could in actual MS/PC/DR-DOS. It was Windows NT that introduced this prohibition, that was also in OS/2 before it. Also, CD A: did not change the current drive letter.

qubex | 3 hours ago

Yeah you’re right it would just be A: to switch the drive… it’s been many many years… but I am sure that you couldn’t format the disk from within it on MS-DOS 5.0 and 6.22 (except maybe with some undocumented switch) because I remember struggling with that problem back in the hiatus summer of ‘92 when I revamping my very mediocre 386SX-16 for the newfangled Windows 3.1.

: JdeBP | 3 hours ago
The rules were different when add-ons like SMARTDRV or Super PC-Kwik were installed, and in a VDM inside 386 Enhanced Mode DOS+Windows. But vanilla MS/PC/DR-DOS originally just calmly let one format the disc out from underneath onesself.

1970-01-01 | 8 hours ago

The quantum fireball was a nice touch.

snvzz | 8 hours ago

Ah. Again[0].

0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROQSw6jqJO8

Gormo | 8 hours ago

Reminds me of the 'BSOD' module from Xscreensaver.

owenmarshall | 7 hours ago

Still my screensaver of choice after two decades. Even after it's tricked me into a forced reboot two or three times...

ButlerianJihad | 6 hours ago

https://man.archlinux.org/man/extra/xscreensaver/decayscreen...

Decay Screen for X11. Written by David Wald, Vivek Khera, Jamie Zawinski, and Vince Levey; 1993.

teddyh | 6 hours ago

Video: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIqbMCfR3r0>

SoftTalker | 6 hours ago

I used to run that at work, but I'd invariably get calls or emails that "your computer is crashing over and over" so I stopped.

: edoceo | 5 hours ago
I'm giving a presentation, stuck on this slide for Q&A, xscreensaver kiks in: Gaaa your computer ate a spark! Audible gasp from audience. Tap trakcpad, back to slide. Afterwards I got more questions about that than vesting schedules.

Tsarbomb | 8 hours ago

Maybe I'm blind, but is this closed source?

creatonez | 7 hours ago

Yup. OP wants you to download a sketchy closed source screensaver from an obnoxiously vibecoded website that looks identical to the scourge of phishing pages currently going after random open source projects in a fully automated way.

hollowonepl | 7 hours ago

Finally some comment that actually makes sense here! :)

[OP] TheIncredibleCh | 6 hours ago

Things aren't always what they seem. Sometimes it's just for fun.

bigfishrunning | 5 hours ago

Yup, totally worth rolling the die and possibly getting your identity stolen. it's just fun guys!

: butlike | 5 hours ago
Life's about living
: phendrenad2 | 5 hours ago
If only there were some kind of program that could scan other programs for malicious code heuristically. Some kind of anti... malware. I'm sure I'm the first to think of this, and it probably wouldn't work.

bushwart | an hour ago

Why not open source?

[OP] TheIncredibleCh | 4 hours ago

Thanks for the compliment. The website turned out great. It’s exactly what we had to deal with over 35 years ago. That’s exactly how it should be!

jrmg | 7 hours ago

This is cool - but…

It’s an app, not a system-integrated[1] screensaver?

> Installation

> Drag FakeDOS.app into /Applications.

> Double-click to launch. It installs itself as a menu-bar icon.

> Click the menu-bar icon to configure or start manually.

> After the configured idle time (default: 5 min), FakeDOS takes over fullscreen.

> Type EXIT to return to your real desktop.

> Cmd + , opens six pages of pure control: idle time, warp speed, the ghost writer, sound and more. The PC speaker can be silenced. Your co-workers cannot.

[1]: ScreenSaver.framework: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/screensaver

: bowsamic | 7 hours ago
I'm surprised that the LLM that was used to vibecode this didn't point it out
: kmoser | 6 hours ago
If they had made it as a website, anybody could use it.

fortran77 | 7 hours ago

It amusing how Mac users yearn for the PC experience. They know they're missing out on something great, but they can't or won't leave their cult.

: wtch98 | 7 hours ago
Except dos isn't the PC experience. It was back in the 90s when you'd edit your config.sys and autoexec.bat to shift your himem settings so you could run a given game with your soundblaster
That world doesn't exist any more, whether you're on a mac, linux, or any other OS.

jasomill | 7 hours ago

I'll stick with 86Box and DOSBox and try not to run FORMAT C: without backups.

rlv-dan | 7 hours ago

Way back I hacked together a VB6 application (don't remember what it did) but after a while it popped up a new window that faked a DOS prompt formatting the c drive. Then I send it to my best bud on April 1st with a message "Hey, check out this new program I made!" :-)

breakwaterlabs | 7 hours ago

Things not on my bingo card: Watching Hacker News denizens download, install, and run vibecoded Mac apps from sketchy vibecoded websites with TLS issues.

nathanaldensr | 7 hours ago

It's time to vibedesign a new bingo card!

Boxxed | 6 hours ago

There is also something about this being Mac-only that feels really dumb or really fitting, I can't quite put my finger on it.

kmoser | 6 hours ago

The delicious irony is that it's written for a platform that never ran MS-DOS.

: ok123456 | 5 hours ago
Insignia SoftPC existed. You could emulate an XT at about half speed on your PowerBook 145.

vunderba | 6 hours ago

Anyone else append something like this to AUTOEXEC.BAT as a kid at school? We were a right bunch of bastards.

  @echo off
  echo FORMAT /Q C:
  echo ALL FILES REMOVED 
  SET DIRCMD=0

I think a lot about my poor teachers and this Calvin quote comes to mind.

https://imgur.com/a/eX4UKLk

: gadders | 5 hours ago
There was some memory command you could stick in someone's autoexec.bat that made the machine reboot so it got stuck in an infinite reboot loop until you stopped it using f5 or f8.

RedShift1 | 6 hours ago

What exactly is this? Site doesn't work for me (ERR_SSL_PROTOCOL_ERROR). Gathering from the other comments, some screensaver that shows a DOS prompt?

: rickdeckard | 6 hours ago
> "Gathering from the other comments, some screensaver that shows a DOS prompt?"
Kinda worse. Some Mac application that acts as a screensaver and shows a DOS-prompt when idle...
Either way, I like the idea of getting people to install and configure fun apps which then know exactly when a PC is not in use.
Could be a useful swarm of devices...

rickdeckard | 6 hours ago

This would be more trustworthy (and portable) as a website (Would have maybe also needed less tokens to produce)

Instead it's a somewhat sketchy app that by design happens to know exactly when my PC is not in use...

mr_tox | 5 hours ago

please, I really need a screen saver with this :)

wduquette | 2 hours ago

I remember the days when `format` with no arguments would happily format drive C: out from under you. I worked in a computer lab at my college where it happened more than once before we put `format.bat` files on all the PCs.

stefs | an hour ago

something like this was among the first programs i wrote when i was a kid; back then - in turbo pascal - for pranking my (~10 year old) cousin. the program created a fake dos that printed warning messages about finding a virus, attempting to delete said virus and failing, then - as a last measure - fake-formatting C and exiting. i then set the "dir" defaults to show only files with a name that didn't exist, so when he typed "dir", an empty harddisk was shown.

the trick was to name the exe non-breaking-space - alt+255 - which was a valid filename and then adding it to the end of the autoexec.bat.

ps: my cousin started to cry.