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Comment by pmohun | Hacker News Reader

This brought back a memory I hadn't accessed in quite a while:

In highschool we had a filesharing systems that teachers "used" to upload class materials, homework, notes, etc.

In reality, about 5% of the teachers used it to host their syllabus but didn't bother to upload anything for the remainder of the year. My junior year I spent the better part of a semester building a workaround to allow students to locally install AoE via a cracked version that I torrented and brought in on a CD. We hosted the files deep into our technologically inept math teachers directory and buried ourselves during study hall to try and host complete matches in our allotted 40 minutes.

I wonder if it's still there. Even today I can still imagine the cries of "more wood please!" very distinctly.

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I love it, I played a ton of AoE in HS but we played a lot of StarCraft as well. The matches in SC (for us at least) went a lot faster so we would play that instead. They had some kind of child protection software on all the computers (They used macs) so you could only launch a handful of programs logged in as a student. I managed to find a workaround.

You couldn't open System Preferences but Safari (much like Internet Explorer) was deeply integrated into the OS. You could open the settings in Safari and change the default browser to... say... terminal. Then you could open up Word (or any app as you'll soon see), type "http://google.com", hit the space bar, then click on the link Word automatically created. The system would then launch that URL in the default browser which you had changed to Terminal. This instance of Terminal had elevated privileges. You didn't have root but you could now run "open /Volumes/StarCraft/StarCraft.app" (You could launch Terminal directly as a student but it wouldn't let you open things). We played a ton of SC that year in "study hall".

Our study hall teacher questioned us about it but didn't know much about computers, was a bit of a pushover, and accepted the answer of "Well the computers let us run the game so it's not dangerous/disallowed". Good times.

If your study hall was anything like mine, there is a bit of irony in the notion that it was intended to help students that were falling behind, some of whom found themselves there because they were too bored and subsequently devoted their time to elaborate ways to play games in class.

HAHA -- In Highschool in 1992, we convinced the Drafting teacher that if we were to ever draft anything - it would be with CAD and not with a pencil. We convinced the North Tahoe Unified School District of same, and they allowed us to buy an Everex Step "Cube" [0] as a server, and run GeneriCad on six workstations.

My best friend and I were already big BBS users from our homes - and were actually grounded for running up a $926 long distance bill calling up PCLink and BBS in San Jose to play The Pit -- so we were already downloading warez and what not.

We convinced the school that they needed a BBS and a modem in the machine - and created a BBS which if you were to log into it with our logins - it was a warez BBS and playing the Pit etc...

But that effort was what got me on the path to architecture, IT and my career.

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[0] https://books.google.com/books?id=wEufoGXlUxUC&pg=PT360&lpg=...

I did something similar.

I found the "master" computer that all other computers in the computer labs at my high school were reimaged from every week. I installed Warcraft 3 on it, a week later every computer in my 5000+ student high school had Warcraft 3.

Probably why I failed my AP Java course...

Yes, Warchief?

Great game, can't recommend it enough. My grades took a hit too, but it was worth it.

In our university they had locked down the windows to not allow us to install anything... A friend had a linux boot disk that would remove the windows admin password. And we had AoE on our the last bench computers! Counter Strike on the second last bench! The admin realized the password was gone, and he reset the system a month later, and the process repeated! Oh so much fun!

I did the same but instead uploaded the original Halo which had network access so anyone, in any class, that were on at the same time could play against each other. Was a bunch of fun, wouldn't surprise me if the miles deep of folders exist on their network still (later, added other games).

We did this as well. The school gave us 4gb flash drives to store our homework on (2009) and we used 7-800MB for a portable version of Halo. The desktops in the school were optimized for CAD software for our engineering classes (STEM school) so Halo ran pretty good.

At one point we had a quarter of the student body playing at once. :)

did something similar with cs1.6 at primary school, someone set up win xp permission badly so I could just install it onto every PCs within root like C:\CS\

Have you heard about cba

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