I remember my friends and I figuring out how to access each other's Novell folders so that we could share games, and we also played big lunchtime matches of games like MOHAA and Command and Conquer: Renegade, much to the chagrin of the librarians and computer lab teachers. 🤣 We did some other stuff too, but unfortunately the fun all ended once one of my friends decided to upload 300GB worth of backups to one of the main servers, and got us banned temporarily for misusing the school network. 🙁 After the ban, the school's network security policies tightened up immensely.

We had a coax network and sometimes the teacher would let us play games. We played Doom and Descent. I can't remember if we put the games on a server, me must have I guess.

I was the only one to re-configure Descent to play with the mouse and therefore always dominated 😊

Our OS was DOS and we learnt a bit of Turbo Pascal which I found very boring at the time. All the assessments involved writing code on paper and that put me off programming.

• Doom
• Unreal Tournament '99
• Showing off Knoppix to friends and having the librarian freak out.
• Having the librarian freak out again when I inserted a 3.5" floppy without the protective metal shutter.
• Chatting among classmates during class using Winpopup and later net send.
• Spamming annoying classmates with 'net send bombs' (batch files calling net send in a loop).
• Booby-trapping computers with batch files/scripts which did mischievous things when executed.
• Setting up hidden folders/shares full 'o goodies.
• Carrying a bare 10GB 3.5" hard disk on a USB to IDE adapter (when USB flash drives started becoming popular). That drive didn't last very long being thrown around in my backpack.
• Figuring out the admin passwords through various methods.
• Fixing the damn things when they broke, especially due to malware.

Played Number Munchers.

When MacOS had text-to-speech for system events with custom messages.........

😀

though Bolo was more important, and of course Oregon Trail on the Apple ii...

• Oregon Trail in elementary and junior high
• LOGO in elementary on Apple II's. We shared a little turtle pen robot peripheral.
• Played Doom and MarioPC (SMB clone) on the 486 side of these weird PowerMacs w/ 486 compat. cards in the programming lab in high school all the damn day
• Hid folders from Windows using extended-ASCII characters in DOS
• net send games

I'm sure I'll think of more.

I exploited that bug in microsoft word (a win31 version) that lets you embed programs in your documents. I used it to circumvent my primary school's network security and gain access to all the goodies I wasn't supposed to use.

In highschool a friend of mine used quick basic to make a fake login screen to collect usernames and passwords from the computers in the library.

*Learned about novell network
*Played civilization for the first time
*Typing tutor. ...ahh the good old days....I was at school during the time when we made a transition from typewriters to pc's. Lol...I still haven't really adopted a proper typing style...I do a kind of hybrid between the proper way and "pecking". I think this is because I spent more time playing civilization, pop games, star control (1 and 2) and Jones in the fast lane with my friends than doing the typing assignments...it was always hard because you had to play when the teacher wasn't looking...man did we drive the teacher mad 🤣.
*used an atari st animation program to create a small cartoon...this was before flash of course 🤣.
*learned how to use word perfect dos and was the first one in my class to implement graphics in my word processing document
*I remember when we got one of the first handheld logitech scanners (black and white of course)..i remember how amazing everyone thought it was...The whole process of scanning a small 3 inch wide image would take so long and the quality was just archaic by today's standards....🤣 we had to sign up to use the scanner and everyone would wait in line to use it
*I learned how to play falcon 3.0 over the network but we could not use a joystick because it would be too obvious we were playing games so we had to use the keyboard...The fun didn't last long though since I got busted playing and got detention for a few days...🤣...still played falcon at home and played with friends over a modem connection
*teacher would occasionally let us play monkey island on the atari st

Anonymous Coward wrote:

I exploited that bug in microsoft word (a win31 version) that lets you embed programs in your documents.

Bug? or the compulsive OLE stuff Microsoft tried to push then? Write had something like this too.

I finished school in 98 and we still didn't have a network! best we did was Stunts and compare lap times.
I remember using them as a software distribution point. Someone would copy a game to the HDD and that's where we would get it from. It would always take a few tries as this was back when you used to zip to multiple disks and there would always be 1 that didn't make it home without read errors.

School wise it was mostly programming in Q basic or Logo writer or learning stuff in MS Works

Finished in 1995 and there was no network, only a room with about 20 PCs (most of them 286 still, but some 486). Fun stuff included playing Tetris (and figuring out how to reconfigure the Turbo-button on the 486 in order to still be able to play Tetris, which was running way to fast on them.

Serious stuff included programming in LiSP and Prolog, which thoroughly prevented me from a programming career.

The first half a dozen years of my schooling we only had Apple II's. We played Spy's Demise, Taipan, some game I forget the name of where you drop down from the top and have to guide your little dude into a hole while avoidng a ball and a sword.... We had a dot matrix printer and would occasionally use them to print big banners but that was about it.

Later on we got a single DOS/Win 3.1 PC and I brought in some shareware games like Raptor.

In my later school years we got a Win 95 network, and the popular prank was to open logo.sys (the startup screen) in paint and change it to whatever you liked, usually 'DELETING....' above the win95 logo, that freaked a few people out.

One guy got caught trying to run WinNuke and got chewed out severely. I never did anything that severe. I got caught for running a program that ran in the background and played a loud burp randomly every few minutes. I left it for the next class to discover. Teacher remembered I was sitting there last class and chewed me out for it.

In primary school we had Microbees thanks mainly to my father's misguided insistence that our small community school 'buy Australian'. Microbees sucked, we should have had Apples or Commodores.

By late high school we had access to a 486 based network, on which we churned out thousands of 'magic eye' images and shared the odd primitive porn clip. Our poor I.T teacher - who was borderline computer illiterate - would reboot our machines at the slightest sign of trouble so of course we'd fake a crash so that she'd rush over looking horrified, reboot, and allow us to watch her enter the admin password. Then it was lunchtime deathmatches until the network admin would find DOOM and delete it, at which point we'd fake another crash.

Ok, you guys are making me feel old. When I was in school it was C64's, and they were the state of the art systems, most had to put up with doing their work on Commodor Pet systems instead of the "new" systems. What did I do? Well mostly we played games. I do remember getting an automatic A in one college course because I got a PC system to boot up with 710k of conventional memory free 😀 The assignment was to get as close to 620k free conventional memory as possible, with our grade being determined by how close we got. He said that we wouldn't actually be able to get to 620, but that it was a good point to use as a grading curve. When I asked about actually going over 620, he laughed and said, "If you can do that, you get an automatic A for the entire course." 😀 hehehe, he didn't specify that you actually be able to do something on the system after the booting up 😀

We had mostly fast P3s and some early P4s when I was in high school, this would have been around 2003-2004.

We played a lot of CS, Skynet, UT99, UT 2K3 and later 2K4. Also played a lot of Street Fighter and Starcraft and probably a few others I'm forgetting. We had a computer engineering course right before lunch, so we'd just blow through that playing whatever, then blow through lunch as well. I had physics right after lunch, but my teacher had the worst accent ever, couldn't understand a word she said... so I ended up skipping most of the rest of the term to game in the computer lab two doors down. Had a programming class as well that I blew away playing mostly UT.

I knew the dude who ran the computer lab, was a co-op student doing his work term. I was able to get an admin password from him; we practically owned the lab for most of the year. At some point the password was changed on the admin account I was using, but I was able to guess the new password. Created a new admin account for myself, problem solved after that.

I had copies of games uploaded to my network share for installation on every computer I could get my hands on. By the middle of the term, there was always a CS or UT game taking place somewhere in the school.

Next year I heard they cracked down on network security and reduced the size of student network shares, probably because mine was ridiculously large compared to most others; I believe had at least 5GB of space at one point. Didn't matter that much as I had moved by then.

I think the only legit memorable thing I actually did in any computer related course was program a text-based RPG based on The Terminator.

Later on in college I remember we played a lot of CS 1.6 and Skulltag, also a lot of Quake.

Computers in school? Haha... I didn't even *see* my first computer until the summer I graduated from college in 1981. Downtown Providence RI with a couple of friends we see this "PC" in a store window, intrigued we go in and walk right up to it. We addressed the thing; "Okay Mr. Computer, you think you're so smart?", then typed in "What's one plus one?" on the keyboard thing [which we didn't have a name for]. Nothing happened... "we thought so", and walked out of the store.

Arcade games like Space Invaders, and Asteroids were pretty popular at that point though. You'd find then mostly in bars, and arcades of course. I was the first in my group to break 1 million on Asteroids - great game. First real PC use was at a job in the '86 or so.

I got banned from the computer labs a couple times. The second time for good. I think it was around 96-97

I used Qbasic to make a little program that made the PC speaker produce sounds in the 14-18khz range. Copied it on all computers. Waited till the lab was empty. Ran the program on 3 dozen computers at the same time.

High pitched hellish symphony ensued which could be heard throughout the school. Some kids fled in terror at the high pitched sound that pierced their ears. Even the director went nuts. Took the authorities a good 20 minutes to find the source of the "problem". Which got me banned from the computer lab. Was totally worth it.

MaxWar wrote:

I got banned from the computer labs a couple times. The second time for good. I think it was around 96-97

I used Qbasic to make a little program that made the PC speaker produce sounds in the 14-18khz range. Copied it on all computers. Waited till the lab was empty. Ran the program on 3 dozen computers at the same time.

High pitched hellish symphony ensued which could be heard throughout the school. Some kids fled in terror at the high pitched sound that pierced their ears. Even the director went nuts. Took the authorities a good 20 minutes to find the source of the "problem". Which got me banned from the computer lab. Was totally worth it.

Lol, that is awesome.

tincup wrote:

Computers in school? Haha... I didn't even *see* my first computer until the summer I graduated from college in 1981.

Wow.... I hear ya' bro. We didn't have pc's when I was in school. At least none that were available to students.

We did have a great quantity of type writers available in the typing classes. Even some "electric" type writers! That was the high tech stuff for us. 🤣

Graduated HS in 1978.