Hacker News Reader

Comment by xvf22 | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com