I have fond memories of gleefully reading Byte Magazine‘s April Fools jokes way back in the ’80s. But the only specific one I could remember actually was not a joke. It was a real product that people assumed was a joke. The MacCharlie, reported on by Byte in 1985, was a device that you plugged onto your Apple Macintosh (now you have to picture one of those old boxy Macs, not the new fruity ones) in order to run IBM-PC applications (well, DOS actually). Externally it looked like a set of two 5.25″ floppy drives that plugged onto the Mac box and a keyboard extender that sat around the Mac keyboard to provide function keys and a numeric keypad. Internally, it had that good ol’ 8088 processor. I don’t know how well it worked, but it certainly was a creative concept for the time. Some actual Byte April Fool’s products that I’ve hunted up were the MacKnifer, a knife-sharpener that fit into the Mac hard disk drive, edible floppy disks made out of soybeans (sensitive data? eat it), and a 5MB hard disk for the Timex/Sinclair 1000. Yes, 5MB was considered a very big joke back then.