At a very small now-defunct Catholic elementary school in the mid-90s, we had typing classes using donated old TRS-80s. They told us to ignore the "syntax error" messages that came up. I was the only serious computer nerd there, who used GW-BASIC on a 286 at home. So I would put all the computers in infinite loops 🤣 good times...

When I took Computer Science there was another class that took Basic called Computer Math and I used the network (Novell?) communication program to send people messages in the Basic class that said "Fatal System Error, press Ctrl-Alt-Delete to continue." Once I took a lot of the useless drivers out of Win 3.1 and fit it on a couple floppies so I could run it from the school PCs since they only ran DOS. When we had Apple IIs in school I made this weird graphics loop program using for loops without really knowing what I was doing.

We did a loooot of things.

I used to play on Amiga's, C64 and Pc's. All the golden oldies from the late 80's to mid 90's.
We used to hack each others computers for the kicks, sharing stuff on novell lite.
We installed a Win 3.11 as an mail-server (the Win3.11 message/mail program).
We installed a complete novell netware 3.12 server and a free-bsd server.
We cleaned 8088/8086 to 80386 computers and restored them, even a 80386sx xenix server.
We did some x86-assembler, pascal and c++ programming. (64-port I/O card communication program)

Last but not least, we just had a great and fun time, testing Win95 as beta's/test's rolled out.
Had fun testing Os/2 against Win95 regarding features and stabillity, and fiddeling around early linux distro's.
And yes... We copied more porn-immages than i ever can recall... It was maddnes.
We had some sort of competition on who could have the largest collection of porn-gif's without using them at all.

Fun times, good times.... Chaos and annarchy on the local coax-net.

redblade7 wrote:

At a very small now-defunct Catholic elementary school in the mid-90s, we had typing classes using donated old TRS-80s. They told us to ignore the "syntax error" messages that came up. I was the only serious computer nerd there, who used GW-BASIC on a 286 at home. So I would put all the computers in infinite loops 🤣 good times...

One dude in my class, logged into the vax-server through an oldschool terminal. Then he made a looping program that started one new process, on each loop.
Well... After a short while, the vax was down... I mean... Really down. 😁

I used to edit the autoexec.bat on the school computers with shit like

@echo off
echo Y | format C:

Obviously, the systems would be working when I was using them, and continued to work the entire day, but I knew they were ticking time bombs. The next day there would be an "Out of order" sign on them.

I would steal cookies from C:\Windows\Cookies and come home and copy them to my machine to hijack login sessions.

Sometimes I would just disable the virtual memory so the machine would BSOD constantly on boot up. I was a pretty bad kid.

I even wrote a pseudo-virus when I was younger. Sophos has a record of it still, hahaha.

http://www.sophos.com/en-us/threat-center/thr … d-analysis.aspx

It was pretty cheesy. That was all a long time ago though.

I read a lot of computer espionage novels and stuff like the "Cuckoo's Egg" and "The Watchman", stuff about Kevin Mitnick, Kevin Poulsen and such. I was a pretty big computer troublemaker when I was younger.

Nowadays some public computers I see don't even have HD's and are PXE booting over a network. Sometimes the kid in me fantasizes about gaining access to the PXE image server and hijacking the base image and creating my own customized one, but nowadays I would no longer get a slap on the wrist but jail time. Not as fun. 🙁

The only thing I did worth noting was buy a school PC (they were phasing out Windows 98 with XP, good times). So, I bought one for 25 euros with monitor, keyboard and mouse and driver discs.

First thing I did is remove all user accounts and then copy random files to random places, remove random files. Eventually it BSoDed. Then when I found it back like 7 years later, I decided to re-install Windows 98, only to find my random Paint files and stuff that I left on the machine. That particular HP Vectra XE310 is still in this very room.

Oh and on another school (I moved), we had Windows XP PCs with MS-DOS Tunneler and some Super Mario clone. We always played with 4 people on one keyboard in that Super Mario clone. Oh and, I would occasionally interrupt two people playing Tunneler, by pressing Escape to crash it to desktop.

I wasn't really a whizz kid back then.

armankordi wrote:

http://i58.tinypic.com/312emvc.jpg […]
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My PC would have been dead if I didn't switch to Google Chrome. I hope this is a joke.

Art class, my freshman high-school year we had a teacher who pretty much did not care, 15min boring assignment at the start of the class, then free to do whatever for the remainder.
This room in the school, had one of the few computers with a sound card too. Not only that it was a pentium 166, when most everything else in the school were 486\DX2-66's. Art was considered media, so they got the best computers apparently, as my high school never had a real computer class\club of any sort.
I had the dos version of Super Street fighter back then, so I brought it to school, installed it on that machine, and for 45min's every day that year half the class had street fighter matches, on the keyboard. Heck I remember the teacher even joining in a few times.
SF was super popular in the US at this time 🤣.

Well being younger than most here (i'd imagine), my school computing started with a BBC Micro and a word processor in my primary school in around 1994/5 (yeah it wasn't exactly a mainstream school). About 2 years later, used an Acorn RISC PC for making a road map. Then in middle school we used a network (Econet?) of Acorn A3020's and an A7000 sitting in the classroom. We played an updated version of Granny's garden on the A7000. OFC, the part where you typed in your favorite food, offered comedy gold when small minded kids like me typed in "sex" and outher vulgar words, even around the age of 8.
There was only 1 Windows PC in there (probably a PI machine) and it was on 95 but that was actually connected to the internet. All I remember is that it had a game called "Big Red Racing" installed and the internet was pants being dial-up. We all pretty much used it to look up cheats for the latest Playstation 1 games at the time. Sometimes playing the Macromedia Shockwave games (my, how things have moved on!).

Later the Acorns all got updated to RM machines which I would assume where probably PII or PIII and I think had 98. Though there was the odd Tiny machine in chassrooms that has a PI or PII. This was around 1999/2000. Still without internet IIRC.

In High School (2001), there were an array of PII or PIII Tiny machines in the main IT room and that were connected to the internet. Ofcourse being the horny teenage bastards we were, we tried to bypass the security and blockers to play flash games and look at 'funny' adult material. With limited success OFC... These were later updated to RM P4 XP machines in around 2002/3. Towards the latter days of high school, we just ended up sending messages via CMD prompt, often spamming the crap out of machines with 1000's of windows boxes. Good times. Though not so good was when people switched the PSU's from 230V to 110V. That didn't end well, especially as 2/3 of the machines blew up after the first week or so.

That pretty much sums up my IT life in schools here in the UK. Cheats, porn, flash games in a nutshell.

fyy wrote:

I used to edit the autoexec.bat on the school computers with shit like […]
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I used to edit the autoexec.bat on the school computers with shit like

@echo off
echo Y | format C:

Obviously, the systems would be working when I was using them, and continued to work the entire day, but I knew they were ticking time bombs. The next day there would be an "Out of order" sign on them.

I would steal cookies from C:\Windows\Cookies and come home and copy them to my machine to hijack login sessions.

Sometimes I would just disable the virtual memory so the machine would BSOD constantly on boot up. I was a pretty bad kid.

I even wrote a pseudo-virus when I was younger. Sophos has a record of it still, hahaha.

http://www.sophos.com/en-us/threat-center/thr … d-analysis.aspx

It was pretty cheesy. That was all a long time ago though.

I read a lot of computer espionage novels and stuff like the "Cuckoo's Egg" and "The Watchman", stuff about Kevin Mitnick, Kevin Poulsen and such. I was a pretty big computer troublemaker when I was younger.

Nowadays some public computers I see don't even have HD's and are PXE booting over a network. Sometimes the kid in me fantasizes about gaining access to the PXE image server and hijacking the base image and creating my own customized one, but nowadays I would no longer get a slap on the wrist but jail time. Not as fun. 🙁

That's evil!