Stefan Jones: All those comments and long variable names they ommitted would've consumed precious bytes, and I'm sure (although I never had one--I started on a C64) most circa-1976 machines wouldn't have had much RAM period, especially if the OS and BASIC were in RAM, not ROM. And at least in C64 BASIC, only the first two characters in a variable name were significant anyway.

ernie: My brother played a nice prank on some Apple ]['s at school one time, he turned off the monitor and ran a program that waited out a long, long, long busy loop, beeped like crazy for a few seconds, then went back to the busy loop. Apparently drove people nuts until they figured out to look for the power LED. My own fave computer prank involved the PCs our school bought to replace the Apples. They all booted from a handful of MS-DOS floppies (no networks or hard disks, natch.) so, after seeing the PROMPT command in a DOS manual, I changed all the DOS prompts to say things like "This machine is posessed!" and "Who is Randy River, and why isn't he wearing any clothes?"