Over the years, you've probably seen this video / gif:
A new Wired article, THE STRANGE HISTORY OF ONE OF THE INTERNET'S FIRST VIRAL VIDEOS, explains how this was from Loronix, later acquired by Verint. I had no idea. Some key quotes:
The video was shot at Loronix, and the computer he smashed belonged to the company, but he wasn’t a frustrated cubicle drone. Loronix was actually a fun place to work, the kind of tech startup where coworkers stay late to play Quake online over the company’s coveted T1 line. They weren’t usually going full barbarian-horde on their office equipment.
But Loronix was developing DVR technology for security-camera systems and needed sample footage to demonstrate to potential clients how it worked. So Licciardi and his boss, chief technology officer Peter Jankowski, got an analog video camera and began shooting...
They converted the video to MPEG-1, so that it’d work best on Windows Media Player and reach the largest amount of people. (“Great resolution—352 x 240,” Jankowski adds, laughing.) They put them on promo CDs and handed them out at trade shows with a company brochure; then they forgot about them.
Over the next year, badday.mpg began to circulate through various companies. The large file caused some problems. “Loronix would get calls from these companies saying, ‘Hey you know this video of yours is getting passed around, and it’s crashing email servers,’” Licciardi says.