Comment by hx2a
4 years ago
When I was in High School (early 90's) we got a new computer system that nobody was using yet. I discovered there was an email system of some kind and that every student had an email address that we were not told about. I also discovered Tetris installed in a directory on the server. I was able to play Tetris and I could show other students how to access it, but it was inconvenient to get to.
Therefore I decided I would email Tetris to every student (I emailed the executable, not a link to Tetris), making it easier for everyone to play also. As soon as I did this the entire system got very slow...apparently the server had no quotas or partitioning and the hundreds of copies of Tetris filled up 100% of the hard drive space. It was a disaster. The computer "specialist" had no idea how to fix the system and she was teaching an adult education class that evening that required the system to work. She was furious and wanted me to get suspended. It didn't happen though because I spoke up about the problem right when I knew there was a problem and also some other teachers intervened on my behalf.
The woman who was responsible for the computer system back then is now the superintendent of the school system. I wonder if she remembers me.
She remembers you.
I also graduated in the early 90's and my children recently graduated from my alma mater. When I went with them to teacher conferences some of the same teachers were still there. Teachers that I didn't even have classes with remember me.
In like '89 when I was 19 and at university my work-study job was with the IT/ComputingResources department (old names). I worked as a graveyard shift NOC operator swapping tapes and handing out print-jobs, running system tests and stuff like that. We had several 24/7 computer labs full of Sun 3/50(60) workstations and things like that. But there was one lab that was closed from 10-5 overnight and I thought to myself "hey, there's a whole room of workstations not doing anything" so I wrote some scripts rsh/NFS and used that lab one night to run distributed ray-tracing jobs. The next day my account was disabled and I had to go talk to Security. They sorta laughed a bit then went like NO don't do that. I worked for the IT department for the next four years. Then I left for a decade. Then I came back and applied for a job. The interview lasted all of five minutes, I worked for a few months before being forcibly promoted up into the upper circle. My first task was to go around to the dozen others who had root and ask for advice and update the root-speech documentation. I got to Security.... tippity tappity "Oh, hello Mr. zengargoyle, let's see... '89 'misuse of computing resources'." LOL, still had root by the end of the day.
So, this is just to say... that places like education where people may stick around for a long while in the system and such. They probably do remember a bunch of events from even a decade ago. It's the good places that have a sense of humor or appreciation for a worthy harmless infraction. They may even be secretly proud or have some admiration.
Though I do sorta fear that I just happened to hit the tail end of old-school hackery where such things are such things are rewarded. Now get off my lawn.