Comment by bashwizard | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bashwizard | Hacker News Reader

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I remember my dad being fed up with me asking "hey dad, can I play Woffenstone?" (yes, I pronounced it like that since I was a 11 year old kid from sweden back then) so he gave me the DOS 5.0 manual and said "here you go kiddo, you can play as much as you want when you've learned how to start the game by yourself).

That's where it all started for me and I was always on the computer whenever I could until my dad got fed up with me installing games and uninstalling his stuff so he password locked it in the BIOS.

So I had to figure out how to bypass the BIOS password which I eventually did by just guessing the password. Now I could play games and mess around on the computer whenever he wasn't at home but I had to hide all my games so that he didn't realize that I was using the computer whenever he wasn't at home. Eventually he did realize that so he changed the password and uninstalled all my games so once again I had to guess the password and this time I put my own BIOS password on it and all hell broke loose.

And that's where the hacker mentality started and sooner than later my dad bought a new computer and gave the old one to me.

Good times.

Great story, thanks for sharing :)

There was a Windows for Workgroups computer lab at my high school. They had a DOS-based login, but accessing the DOS prompt from Windows was disabled. At one point, someone figured out that the login screen could be bypassed by pressing Ctrl+Break; the teacher found out and disabled that particular keystroke. But after hours of experimenting, I figured out that Alt+3 sends an ASCII character (0x3) that has the same effect. So we were back to playing games in the lab after hours -- they were often hidden in a folder named Alt+255 which looked like a space in DOS but was invisible to the File Manager in Windows. Good times :)

That also reminds me of when I regularly used to visit our local library after school (junior in high school at that time) which had these job terminals (win95 boxes connected to the internet through a fiber connection) for people to use when looking for jobs.

Apparently they disabled basically all keystrokes while the application ran so we could only use a trackball to navigate the job board web site and print.

I never figured out how to just enable keystrokes again so I just unplugged the power cord, booted up in safe mode and edited autoexec.bat and uncommented the line for the application to autorun on windows boot up and rebooted. Free fiber internet and a lot of IRC for weeks to come!

However one of the librarians came up to me one day and asked "aren't you a little too young to be looking for a job?" and I was just joking and replied "yeah well, it's rough times you know". She looked concern and then looked at the screen and said something like "What's your name? I don't think you're allowed to do that... I'm going to have to tell you to get up and leave now".

I was indefinitely banned from using the computers and job terminals.

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