Super Hi-Res Chess
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Super Hi-Res Chess was a novelty computer program for the Apple II written by Apple Computer staff programmer Bruce Tognazzini early in the history of Apple computers. It was a practical joke program purporting to be a chess game in high-resolution graphics, but which actually contained no chess or graphics. When the unsuspecting user tried to run the program, it promptly crashed with a syntax error, appearing to return the user to the Applesoft BASIC command line input mode. However, when the user attempted to use any BASIC or Apple DOS commands, there would be humorous results, since the program was actually still running and only pretending to be the Apple's command line processor. Many different commands were "parodied", with silly error messages resulting. This is the sort of prank that worked in the early days of personal computing, when most users were also programmers (at least at the hobbyist level), and their natural inclination after a program crashed would be to try to debug it to see what went wrong; such "computer humor" wouldn't work the same way in the modern era of non-programming users, compiled software offering no debugging possibilities even for technically-minded users, and graphical user interfaces having no command lines to parody.
