CompTIA to Retire Popular A+ Certification

Made you click? Yeah, we know, technically April 1 was yesterday. The GoCertify home office is closed on Sunday, though, and it was Easter Sunday, to boot. That's just not the right setting to make mischief, pull pranks, have a laugh, and so forth. You know? So we kept our powder dry for 24 hours.

To be perfectly clear: CompTIA is not planning to do away with its flagship certification, and no B+ and C+ tandem replacement is in the works. Well, at least as far as anyone's told us, that is. Maybe it's all true and the only question anyone asks later on will be, "How did little ol' GoCertify get a leak like that?

So, yeah, we apologize. For any international visitors who are wondering, April Fool's Day, which falls on April 1 in the United States, is a religious observance that has been so rampantly commercialized by greeting card companies and chocolatiers that you can buy a chocolate crucifix at WalMart (true story) for you childrens' goody baskets.

Or wait, maybe we're thinking of some other recent celebratory jubilee. Ahhh, right. It turns out that April Fool's Day is descended from western European hijinks that began sometime in the Middle Ages, when life was hard and people sometimes needed an excuse to laugh and make merry.

There are a number of possible origin stories, as well as competing claims that this or that writer or historical record is the first to reference the unique tradition of a day set aside for tricks, fake news, and general jiggery pokery.

Depending on whether or not you are a Mac user or Apple disciple, the greatest prank in IT history either did (if you despise Apple and its products) or did not (if your feelings are otherwise) occur on April 1, 1976, when two Steves (Jobs, Wozniak) and one Ronald (Wayne) came together to formally establish the Apple Computer Company.

Tech companies love to pull pranks, though, and you shouldn't just take our word for it. Just this year, IBM announced the launch of a Model Q quantum keyboard, for example, and Adobe trumpeted a new Illustrator feature that lets hungry designers do drag-and-drop food orders.

Amazon may have won the prank war with its fairly spectacular video showing a new feature in action that lets readers "book" personal visits from favorite authors.

If you're in the mood to crack a smile and kill some time, there's a comprehensive list of April 1 tomfoolery from both tech companies and other corporate entities over at the online edition of The Washington Post. We hope you've enjoyef this brief interlude, and we'll leave it at that for another 12 months.