|
I was more commenting on the programming class being Apple II Basic. They didn't offer that class anymore after that year. I know I was a big pain in the rear end because the programs they made us write were fairly useless, and I kept adding functionality to them.
|
#
?
Jun 13, 2014 14:55
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 24, 2024 04:44 |
|
|
Christmas Present posted:The HardCard, a solution for plunking an HDD on a system with ISA slots. This is the same one we had, with an insane 20MB of storage data, meant that DOS booted up in no time and thousands of elementary school reports/dot matrix printer banners could be saved. It's gotta be said, for a piece of technology that's a quarter of a century old, the HardCards look pretty slick and modern.
|
|
#
?
Jun 13, 2014 15:02
|
|
|
Krispy Kareem posted:I had both a 5 1/4 and 3 1/2 inch drive and was considered a golden god by my friends. Oh Hells, yeah. My elementary school (late 80's to early 90's,) had a "computer lab" with like half a dozen Macs in it:  And then in Junior high and high school (mid 90's to 2000, same building,) we had two computer labs. The older one was full of those IBM's above...maybe 25-30 of them. I took a intro level computer programming class with them in Pascal. Those things were still in there when I graduated. The "better" computer lab originally had a few PCs with Win 95 on them, and actual internet access. Then my junior or senior year they got a couple dozen Packard Bell PCs with Win 98. It was fun being young and knowledgeable about computers in those days. Nothing was locked down, no content filters or firewalls. I was actually relatively good. I'd just do silly stuff like change a bunch of startup/shutdown sounds (usually to Simpsons WAVs,) do the ol' "screenshot the desktop + icons, set as background, delete all icons" prank, etc... My friend's little brother got into MASSIVE trouble for doing far, far worse things on the network. Juvenile hall and all that jazz.
|
|
#
?
Jun 13, 2014 15:03
|
|
|
High School, the iMac had just been released, we had our labs full of that funky variant with both a CD rom and a floppy drive (how else could we save our work?). Considering I was like one of 3 kids who had a Mac, I knew how to reboot the machines without extensions and shut off Fool Proof. I got in trouble for installing the Marathon Demo and having death matches one lunch.
|
|
#
?
Jun 13, 2014 15:08
|
|
|
The vast majority of my school computing was on one of these beasts The Acorn Archimedes 3000, running RISC OS 2  
|
|
#
?
Jun 13, 2014 16:03
|
|
|
This is what my high school had. You could program it in APL! 
|
|
#
?
Jun 13, 2014 16:09
|
|
|
We had Macs in our newspaper class. I think we used Pagemaker. That software was so cool. Then I got to college and started using pizza box Macs with huge 17 inch monitors and software that let you type in a circle. Mind blowing. We had two of them networked together so play some Star Destroyer versus Enterprise game.
|
|
#
?
Jun 13, 2014 16:13
|
|
|
Iron Crowned posted:Considering I was like one of 3 kids who had a Mac, I knew how to reboot the machines without extensions and shut off Fool Proof. I got in trouble for installing the Marathon Demo and having death matches one lunch. My junior high rolled out 25-30 machines running Win 3.11 that had some security program (Ace Win Lock or something) that limited functionality, particularly that I couldn't drop out to DOS. It was easy enough to get around though, since the program stored the password in plain text in the win.ini file. The computer teacher was a little dismayed when I gave him a scrap of paper with the password on it. My parents were dismayed that I selected Parent Teacher Interview day as the day on which to do that. And you can hide a lot of stuff on office/school/whatever PCs if you rename it to .dll and just sock it away in the Windows root directory. There's probably some equivalent for Macs, but I don't care because I hate them.
|
|
#
?
Jun 13, 2014 16:49
|
|
|
Antifreeze Head posted:My junior high rolled out 25-30 machines running Win 3.11 that had some security program (Ace Win Lock or something) that limited functionality, particularly that I couldn't drop out to DOS. It was easy enough to get around though, since the program stored the password in plain text in the win.ini file. One of my teachers told us about something similar. They had the command line locked down in Windows, and someone made a text file that just said "CMD" and changed the extension to a .exe So stupidly simple.
|
|
#
?
Jun 13, 2014 16:51
|
|
|
I was fortunate enough to grow up back when Windows stored passwords with really weak encryption, and made it reasonably easy to get to those files... Not that I needed it for very much. In secondary school we had quake 1 deathmatches in the spare time inn the computer lab (with the responsible teacher - who I remember as a better player than 14 year old me). In high school, we had win98 , though I remember being a bit envious of the nice new win2000 workstations and Macs in the newly started media course. My (second) primary school had a whole lot of these things standing around, probably about 10 year old by the time I got there. I never used them myself, but I know some of the kids that had extra help and one-on-one classes played games on them - probably as a reward. No idea if they where ever used for touch typing classes.
|
|
#
?
Jun 13, 2014 17:45
|
|
|
Iron Crowned posted:One of my teachers told us about something similar. They had the command line locked down in Windows, and someone made a text file that just said "CMD" and changed the extension to a .exe I remember my school's computers had 'RM Safety Net', which was a useless pile of garbage. You weren't supposed to be able to access the C: drive, and they had disabled the ability to create shortcuts... But not the ability to do a local hyperlink in Word. Which could give you access not only to the C: drive, but also to all the servers accessible over the network... I could probably have put the whole lot out of commission for a good day or two, (or longer depending on how well they backed everything up). And I found a website which had a list of the default passwords used for the setup user accounts. Which our techs hadn't changed half of. Whoops. (I thought I was such a 1337 H4X0R it's frankly embarrassing in retrospect...)
|
|
#
?
Jun 13, 2014 17:49
|
|
|
On the password note — my HS had what was called an absence sheet that was given out to all teachers every day, with a list of pupils marked absent at morning registration, and teachers on the back who were covering other teacher's absences. The list of teachers carried their full names. It was, ahem, discovered that the log in details for the teachers' accounts on the school network was [first letter of forename][surname] and the password was [full forename]. Initially, this was useful because logging in as a teacher meant you could browse the internet much more freely, though not completely so — good enough for flash games, though! However, it became apparent that if you had a Guidance teacher's log in, you could read their entire record about a given student under their care. Including the personal statement you weren't supposed to see that was part of your university application. I'm not saying I changed mine, of course... [Edit] vvv in my primary school, we had those little Macs, and we were told never to empty the Trash or the police would be called 
Jeherrin has a new favorite as of 18:01 on Jun 13, 2014 |
|
#
?
Jun 13, 2014 17:59
|
|
|
I forget if I posted this in this thread or not already, but it was a fun, fun day when we learned how to use NET SEND on the network in highschool.  For those who don't know, NET SEND allows you to broadcast messages to specific machines on a network... or the whole network, accompanied by a "ding" on any computer with speakers hooked up when the dialog box would pop up. Good times were had, and oh god did the spanish teacher get furious. DING DING DING DING DING DING DING And yeah, older computer locking methods were incredibly lousy [and probably cost the school districts ungodly amounts of money]. AtEase for Mac was trivial to bypass [iirc, a Hypercard command could shut it down or otherwise bypass it] and if I recall, the only protection on the old Apple IIe machines we learned typing on was just defaulting us to some directory outside the root. Changing directory to the root of the disk allowed us to find the /games/ folder, which had all kinds of awesome stuff. The windows boxes we had in late high school just had weak passwords, which eventually made their way around the school. I'm so glad my dad taught me computer literacy at a young age. Made school much more fun! Oh, and something I just remembered - the IT guy in the library at my high school told us that changing the screensaver was "illegal". Not that I bought it then, but I guess I figured that it was some default Microsoft screensaver and we had to keep that set because of some licensing deal or something. In reality, it was probably a last ditch effort to get us to stop loving with the computers.
|
|
#
?
Jun 13, 2014 18:00
|
|
|
I managed to get an administrator account on my school network in the 90s by asking one of the techs to change something on my account, then while the profile screen was up having a friend distract him so I could change my account from 'User' to 'Administrator'. *SOCIAL ENGINEERING!!!* I felt like Zero Cool browsing through teacher's CVs and parent/teacher correspondence.
|
|
#
?
Jun 13, 2014 18:01
|
|
|
Code Jockey posted:
Oh god. I remember when Windows still told users that programs had performed "illegal operations." Little kid me freaked out the first time he saw that.
|
|
#
?
Jun 13, 2014 20:20
|
|
|
Code Jockey posted:I forget if I posted this in this thread or not already, but it was a fun, fun day when we learned how to use NET SEND on the network in highschool. During one IT class at school we figured out how to use NET SEND. All fun and games until I inadvertently told the print server to 'gently caress off' after it messaged me about a successful print. Turns out our class teacher was using that terminal and I forgot that my usename was broadcast along with the message. Tried to plead that someone else must've sent the message but he never believed me.
|
|
#
?
Jun 13, 2014 20:43
|
|
|
Man, NET SEND was the best thing. Stupid rear end in a top hat spammers using it getting it removed from default installs...
|
|
#
?
Jun 13, 2014 20:57
|
|
|
DarthBlingBling posted:During one IT class at school we figured out how to use NET SEND. All fun and games until I inadvertently told the print server to 'gently caress off' after it messaged me about a successful print. Turns out our class teacher was using that terminal and I forgot that my usename was broadcast along with the message. Tried to plead that someone else must've sent the message but he never believed me. I think we must've had generic user accounts on our terminals at school since no one ever officially got busted for the NET SEND antics, but everyone basically knew who it was anyway. I know I mentioned this in some other thread before, but I once got chewed supremely for "hacking the network" - because, on one of the Macs in the tiny computer lab by one of my classes, someone had created a bunch of "Copy of ___", "Copy of Copy of ____", "Copy of Copy of Copy of _____" files. Chalk that up to an extreme case of not knowing what the gently caress hacking was / the harmlessness of copying files, but that TA/lab monitor was pissed at me. I didn't even do it! I guess I was the only person they could find who knew how to operate a computer, and that was sufficient evidence. It was seriously like 10 files too, it's not like someone wrote a script to copy files until the disk filled up. A misdemeanor at best! strangemusic posted:Oh god. I remember when Windows still told users that programs had performed "illegal operations." Little kid me freaked out the first time he saw that. I remember non-computer-literate people [which was a huge amount of people back in the day] freaking out on that too. Great choice of wording, Windows devs.
|
|
#
?
Jun 13, 2014 23:23
|
|
|
On the Mac days we had a folder called "The icon folder" which was a collection of icons that we would use to decorate our disks or other things with. You still can open up a program's information window, select the icon, then copy and paste it into another. Oh boy, Net Send. During my high school time there were just enough computer savvy kids who would be happy little grey hackers improving the school's system, while finding ways to get away with playing games. There was at least two generations of successive hackers who learnt off the older students and slowly added their own twists. It was handy being able to remotely access school emails. Net Send was the devil's plaything as simply going NET SEND JLASTNAME Hello Dickhead would send off immense cries of frustration or terror thinking they were being hacked. NET SEND * Hello School would send off the message to every computer in the school's network, which branched across three separate campuses and all years. Enter someone's cute idea of creating a .bat file that ran a * message with the lyrics to Uncle Fucker and sent it through the school email network or planted it into the startup folders of several computers and taught the kids some new words. For quite a while we were greeted that on login with several prompts from various students and many of the admin staff trying to work out what was going on. Then we had the school network, Two main drives existed, the Home (H:) for student work. The H: had barely any space to store your work, I think it was 20mb. The Admins would snoop onto H: drives to check if something shifty was there - at one point a friend got bored and played a game of "how many shortcuts can open my H: when only one can work at a time?" and the Admin freaked wondering what on earth it did. The other was the group drive (G:) meant for simple schoolwork handups. But there were holes, teachers would make folders with lax permissions and we'd sneak on copies of the UT demo and other games. Our ill gotten gains were kept well hidden, but every file you'd place would have your name stamped on it, unless you were craven enough to notice someone who hadn't signed out and quickly swapped over ownership. A friend managed to go one step further and somehow hook his H: into the school's FTP server. On a glance it looked like he had 20mb, but had the capacity well beyond that and kept well out of sight. He fessed up before finishing school.
|
|
#
?
Jun 14, 2014 00:34
|
|
|
At some point during my time at high school, some of the CompSci students managed to get Quake III Arena and Halo installed to the server. If all the work was done, they'd end up in LAN matches for the rest of the period. I gave a disc of SNES, NES, and GBA ROMs with emulators, and they uploaded them as well. When I left two years later, I could still see some people loving around playing Castlevania: Circle of the Moon and Yoshi's Island on the school computers.
|
|
#
?
Jun 14, 2014 02:38
|
|
|
Our high school had a bunch of Windows 95s with an NT 4.0 acting as a domain controller and a file server. The teachers didn't really have any interest in policing the network, so one of the fileshares kept accumulating a lot of random crap. It was so big that one could hide entire games like Subspace, MUD clients or Quake(world) in it. Even multiple copies, just in case some idiot got caught playing one during a class and the teacher deleted it. Because we were seniors, we could choose what classes we wanted to take and thus ended up with an occasional hour or two of free time in the middle of the day. After a bit of convincing, the teachers let us stay in the computer class and do whatever we wanted, as long as it didn't interfere with actual school work. They even gave us the password for the domain administrator and let us set up a permament Quakeworld server on the domain controller. The price of such freedom was the responsibility to keep the network functioning and to chase out any juniors who tried to skip class. Good times.
|
|
#
?
Jun 14, 2014 05:25
|
|
|
I was in 6th grade in '92 in Redmond, WA. The ironic thing was that we exclusively had Macs as the classroom computers in the Lake Washington School District, which pretty much sucked balls for all their students as most of them had Microsoft compatible systems at home because, hey, Microsoft country. Most students couldn't work on their school work at home without their parents being knowledgeable about some way to support the disk format and buying extra software, IIRC... One funny thing that did happen, though, was my classmates finding a printer in a library in another elementary, about 20 miles away from our school, on the Chooser. I don't remember what got printed, but the loving superintendent of the distict gave our class a "talking to" the next day.
|
|
#
?
Jun 14, 2014 05:36
|
|
|
Code Jockey posted:
|
|
#
?
Jun 14, 2014 05:43
|
|
|
Tsaedje posted:The vast majority of my school computing was on one of these beasts Freaking Acorns. Our high school was still using them up until about 1999. Older than that we even had a lab of BBC Micro Model 2s for us to use LOGO on. Christmas Present posted:The compy was scrapped about fifteen years ago after taking up space in the basement, though I do wish I had salvaged this out of it: I found a 100MB Hard Card in a parts bin for $1. I could never format it though but it did have a copy of one of the Tycoon games on it.
|
|
#
?
Jun 14, 2014 11:31
|
|
|
Up to fairly recently, my grandfather used a BBC model B and the daisy wheel printer to write letters. Still works fine, to the best of my knowledge. 
|
|
#
?
Jun 14, 2014 12:36
|
|
|
Code Jockey posted:It was seriously like 10 files too, it's not like someone wrote a script to copy files until the disk filled up. A misdemeanor at best!
|
|
#
?
Jun 14, 2014 12:51
|
|
|
Collateral Damage posted:Related (same show): The Pentium 200 MMX came out in 1997 so he was pretty close, as far as computing predictions go!
|
|
#
?
Jun 14, 2014 18:14
|
|
|
It wasn't bad, but kind of funny when you look at what speeds were available in 1999: http://www.intel.com/pressroom/kits/quickrefyr.htm#1999
|
|
#
?
Jun 14, 2014 19:45
|
|
|
carry on then posted:It wasn't bad, but kind of funny when you look at what speeds were available in 1999: http://www.intel.com/pressroom/kits/quickrefyr.htm#1999 What caused the gigantic increase in clock-speeds around that time? Was the P6 Architecture that much more efficient with it's decoding x86 into micro-ops or was it just process tech improvements?
|
|
#
?
Jun 15, 2014 01:03
|
|
|
Vanagoon posted:What caused the gigantic increase in clock-speeds around that time? Was the P6 Architecture that much more efficient with it's decoding x86 into micro-ops or was it just process tech improvements? Pretty much just following Moore's law. 
|
|
#
?
Jun 15, 2014 01:39
|
|
|
Vanagoon posted:What caused the gigantic increase in clock-speeds around that time? Was the P6 Architecture that much more efficient with it's decoding x86 into micro-ops or was it just process tech improvements? AMD released the athlon which meant that intel would have to actually put effort in improving their processors at the time.
|
|
#
?
Jun 15, 2014 03:04
|
|
|
That was also around the beginning of the time when Intel was working the Megahertz myth so hard. While the P3 was a good processor, Intel's desire to blow AMD away on clock speed led to the dire NetBurst architecture, where AMD XPs were faster than Pentium 4s despite having half the clock frequency. Netburst is definitely failed technology, an architecture that ran so hot and so slow despite its clock rate that Intel chose the Pentium III to create its mobile Pentium M, and the Pentium M was chosen as the basis for the Core Duo successor to both the 4 and M. carry on then has a new favorite as of 03:33 on Jun 15, 2014 |
|
#
?
Jun 15, 2014 03:30
|
|
|
carry on then posted:Netburst is definitely failed technology, an architecture that ran so hot and so slow despite its clock rate that Intel chose the Pentium III to create its mobile Pentium M, and the Pentium M was chosen as the basis for the Core Duo successor to both the 4 and M. "Netbust" I still have an old Optiplex and it's got a Prescott Core P4 in it. The stupid thing is annoyingly slow despite running at 2.8GHz. POS just sits in the closet of junk most of the time. I probably should just bin it but I like having extra computers around. My 1.6GHz Merom C2D Thinkpad blows it the gently caress away. (X61 Tablet) Vanagoon has a new favorite as of 03:46 on Jun 15, 2014 |
|
#
?
Jun 15, 2014 03:41
|
|
|
DarthBlingBling posted:During one IT class at school we figured out how to use NET SEND. All fun and games until I inadvertently told the print server to 'gently caress off' after it messaged me about a successful print. Turns out our class teacher was using that terminal and I forgot that my usename was broadcast along with the message. Tried to plead that someone else must've sent the message but he never believed me. Like someone else mentioned a few pages back about knowing a fellow student that went to juvenile hall over hacking antics of some kind at school, I remember someone in my year during high school used NET SEND to give everyone on the network a message that was something like "I will cut [teacher]'s loving head off you loving bitch" or something to that effect. Unfortunately for them, it let everyone see the sender's school-issued username that included their first initial, last name, and graduating class year. Whoops! They disappeared from the school soon after with rumors that the guy went to "boot camp." 
|
|
#
?
Jun 15, 2014 05:32
|
|
|
Vanagoon posted:"Netbust" I still have a system with a Pentium D 915 (dual core 2.8 GHz netburst based) and its amazing home much slower it is than the E7400 that replaced it (despite the C2D having less cache and 30W lower TDP)
|
|
#
?
Jun 15, 2014 05:46
|
|
|
Drone_Fragger posted:I was under the impression that the OUYA is garbage and didn't the developers dumb it like a thick steaming turd straight after launch? Manky posted:Ouya: Y'all know what it is.
|
|
#
?
Jun 16, 2014 00:49
|
|
|
Computer viking posted:My (second) primary school had a whole lot of these things standing around, probably about 10 year old by the time I got there. I never used them myself, but I know some of the kids that had extra help and one-on-one classes played games on them - probably as a reward. No idea if they where ever used for touch typing classes. Oh the horror of TIKI. :| My elementary school got 20 of them donated from the municipality, and we had to use them for everything. drat downgrade, especially since we already had 486s in almost every class room (I remember having a cold and not being allowed to go outside between classes, so I just played Action Supercross and Liero on the class 486. Good times. Having to use a TIKI-100 in 1999 is probably one of the worst experiences I've had with computers. Maybe except for being told to install Windows 7 on a 486 for the janitor at the place I worked at a couple of years ago. Code Jockey posted:I forget if I posted this in this thread or not already, but it was a fun, fun day when we learned how to use NET SEND on the network in highschool. In high school we overloaded the school network (which for some reason was not separate from the admin / teacher network) with NET SEND * HELLO WORLD in .bat-files. And our IT guy was hopeless and had no idea what was going on. 6 months later we got some weird linux for schools, called "School Linux" (or "Skole-Linux" in Norwegian), which was surprisingly easy to gently caress around with, even if you had almost no skill. This of course ended with me and my classmates shutting down computers all over the place when we were bored. Good times.
|
|
#
?
Jun 16, 2014 18:07
|
|
|
Datasmurf posted:6 months later we got some weird linux for schools, called "School Linux" (or "Skole-Linux" in Norwegian), which was surprisingly easy to gently caress around with, even if you had almost no skill. This of course ended with me and my classmates shutting down computers all over the place when we were bored. Even if it wasn't intentionally easy to gently caress around with, that is still pretty cool. Learning as a subversive activity is so much better than cookie-cutter assignments.
|
|
#
?
Jun 16, 2014 20:29
|
|
|
Skolelinux lives on, and is these days also known as Debian Edu. More surprising, they did a lot of the original code for the current debian installer (and a fair bit of work for the linux terminal server project).
|
|
#
?
Jun 16, 2014 23:36
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 24, 2024 04:44 |
|
|
How is that surprising at all? They had a need for things like a nice, friendly installer, they wrote it, and they offered it upstream if upstream wanted it. That's how basically everything gets done.
|
|
#
?
Jun 17, 2014 00:29
|
|