For April Fool's Day 1996, Amy Ayers, Ami Feinstein and I decided to take our intra-office tradition of practical jokes to the masses.

Ami coded a Java applet that would toggle the buttons on the home page between visible and invisible whenever they were clicked (after a number of clicks, an "April Fool's" message would pop up and then the page would be usable). We actually put that version up on the morning of the 1st, but the applet was crashing a lot of people's browsers. So, we took down the page, and in a moment of quick inspiration and Photoshop hacking, I replaced the home page with a version that had all images and text backwards.

We left it that way until about 5pm, when we were forced to put it back to the original configuration because of complaints from users not being able to use the site. We actually received some calls warning us that "something is wrong with your server, it's serving everything backwards!".

Click on the thumbnail above to see an archived version of the page. I have an archive of the Java applet-based page, but the Java code no longer works with modern browsers (sorry...).