When March 31, 1998 arrived, I hadn't any plan or idea of what to do for that year's joke. At lunch that day, my group and I batted around a couple of ideas and finally settled on trying to play off of/make fun of the growing trend of in-line (transparent) network caches.

In true View from the Village style, I crafted a fake press release announcing that in order to conserve bandwidth, Georgia Tech had placed a "color filter" on the network that filtered all the red, green, and blue from each passing network packet. A little batching with Graphic Converter and I had a grey-scale version of the page ready.

What made this one a lot of fun was that we offered up a reply form that users could fill out to send back their opinions of the change. Once the form was submitted, the "thank you" page notified them of the joke.

Click on the thumbnail above/to the left to view and archived copy of the page (be sure to read the announcement...). Also, I was able to dig up a copy of some of the feedback messages that we received.