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Comment by TimTheTinker | Hacker News Reader

In my high school’s Windows For Workgroups 3.11 lab, we used to hide local installs of Doom, Descent, and other DOS games under a folder named the character Alt+255 (which looks like a space in DOS and was invisible to Windows Explorer).

The lab admin had disabled Ctrl+C and Ctrl+Break to keep folks from breaking out of the DOS-based login prompt to a C:\ prompt, but I somehow figured out that Alt+3 passed an equivalent character and had the same effect.

I once got yelled at for being “in the lab too much” by one of the teachers, but I never got in any trouble. I suspect the lab admin (a kind older programming and math teacher) knew what we were up to.

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In the early 90s in middleschool (6-8th grade) we had access to a macintosh lab - the original macs - and they were all networked and relatively locked down. What they didn't do however, was lock down access to shared network drives. In the lab we had a limited number of games on 3.5" floppy disks and if you didn't get there early enough, no games for you. In one of the classes held in the lab we were instructed as to how to save our work to the network instead of a floppy. This was in the heyday of Hypercard and so that's what was usually stored by students on network drives. When my father showed me how to copy data from a disk to a drive at home, I connected the dots. I went into the lab after school one day and copied all of the games I liked playing, somewhere in the neighborhood of 50, from disk to the network. At 13 years old, I thought I was slick. No more waiting for games. I enjoyed this advantage for about a week, until I was called into the Principal's office and had a talking to by the network admin and the lab teacher. I had absolutely no concept of storage size, and at ~60mb I had taken up a considerable amount of storage on the network at the time.

Did something similar in the late 90’s / early aughts.

Figured out the default password scheme for teachers.

Found several teacher accounts that didn’t change their default password.

Teacher accounts could write to network drives when students couldn’t.

Put games like it, quake 2 and c&c ra2 on the network.

Lasted about six months.

A student I had confided in ratted me out.

I was no longer permitted to touch another school computer.

I failed every class that required me to use a school computer.

Despite the fact I brought my own laptop to school, they wouldn’t let me use it.

Formal education and I never got along after that.

That's ridiculous, maybe I'm over-involved with my kids but I'd think your parents would go to bat for you in that one. The school making you fail other classes over that is unacceptable

There's a reason why "The Mentor"'s Hacker Manifesto has disdain for schools. I've had similar things happen at high school. Still, anecdote.

Unless your parents can and will sue, the public schools (SPIT) will do as they choose.

They tried. I wasn't exactly a stellar student anyway. We switched me to another school district to finish out high school.

I'm convinced that I would have had a more useful education if I had dropped out, moved to Silicon Valley, and lived out of a van working for minimum wage at a startup than if I had finished high school.

I had a similar ban from using my high school's computing equipment for an even tamer reason - sending messages to my friend in the same classroom using "net_send", which the school claimed DDOS'd their network and blew it out of proportion like I was some hardcore out of control hacker.

I was given 20 hours of "community service" (school punishment, total joke) in middle school after discovering the messaging feature in Novell (the admin didn't disable it).

For a couple weeks the school was absolutely convinced my friend and I were responsible for taking a few computer labs in the district offline and claimed we created a virus.

I suspect we both had the same frustrating conversation with our head teacher :-)

I was suspended for three days in a separate incident at another school system I started going to the following year for using Winpopup to send messages.

We had a mac lab in late 90s/early 2000s and they didn't lock down shared network drives either. A friend and I discovered this one day and we were looking around on the network and found that we could access teacher's gradebooks lol. We also weren't allowed to install games, but found a way around that by scheduling a task to run the installer a minute in the future.

I had a similar experience but amongst other things I got everyone's passwords and figured out how to bypass / control this weird bookshelf launcher whose name escapes me now. The head computer teacher found out but didn't make a big deal about it. Instead, me and a friend ended up getting hired by the school for our last year and got an office with a coffee machine since we were easier to deal with than the school boards IT.

I wonder if you're talking about the launcher for managed classic Mac workgroups, At Ease. I have an almost identical experience to you, including the coffee machine (though more of a closet than an office).

All it took to get around At Ease was to hit the interrupt or programmers key (which on newer Macs was cmd + the power button on the keyboard). That brought up the micro debugger, and you just had to type "G FINDER" and it'd dump you right out to the Finder.

Eventually our folks replaced At Ease with some other app, (Cyber something, control something? no idea) but they setup a hotkey to disable it which was nothing less than shift + K. That didn't last long at all, with Karla, Kyle, Keith, and Katie getting incredibly frustrated just trying to type their name.

I remember on Deep Freeze for Windows, I was able to find the password in plaintext by searching win386.swp for the deepfreeze copyright string.

I had that as well. it was some IBM product.. we figured out that open file dialogs on well, everything still let you start windows explorer. From there you could get a dos prompt and do stuff.

It was used for broodwar mostly, this was around 1998

Yup it was IBM something and the same era.

Was this IBM School Vista by any chance? The login screen was a school entrance with yellow buses, the main screen was a student desk in a classroom, and the application launcher was a bookshelf in the classroom. One of my friends and I also had a fun time finding ways to break out of the locked-down shell into Windows Explorer -- as well as making interactive parodies of the classroom UI using PowerPoint and HyperStudio.

My friends & I used to play Netrek in the Mac lab, which was against the rules. When the lab assistant would walk into the lab, we'd all hit the reboot button. Hearing ~10 simultaneous ding noises was pretty hilarious. He knew what we were doing, but never caught us in the act, and I suspect he found it more amusing than not.

Around my branch of the University of California it was Marathon. When the lab got Power Mac 7100s, it was full at all hours with people playing, which made it impossible to get any actual coursework done.

He knew what you was doing, he was just letting you have some fun. If you work in IT now, he probably helped push you in the right direction.

You could also put ANSI codes in filenames, to set black text on black background for fun.

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