Comment by dahwolf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dahwolf | Hacker News Reader

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In 1996, our school had a break room with 30 DOS-based computers running Pegasus. Each computer would typically have a queue of 3-4 people behind the current user, all eager to check their mail. Most had no internet at home or very limited/expensive access.

Me and some friends were into programming. We would exit Pegasus to return back to the DOS prompt, and then write simple programs that persist in memory, so basically running in the background. Next, we'd reopen Pegasus and left the station.

The next in line would log in to their email and be busy with it for some 5 minutes after which our program would activate. It would draw random pixels on screen, mirror the entire screen vertically, output random tones on the beeper, all kinds of weird stuff to suggest that the machine is possessed.

We'd be hiding behind some column observing it and laughing.

Pretty pathetic, but good times.

In high school we found we could use netsend to send messages to other computers; or every computer on the network at once. The rest of the school year was a back and forward where the sysadmins would try to block us and we would find ways around it. I think the final method that worked was writing vbscript macros inside Excel.

I found that trick and showed it to some friends... But it's hard to keep a secret, and somehow a larger non-friend group was using it to cheat in a computer-lab class. I was offended by the blatant cheating, and a little by the idea that certain people I didn't particularly like were profiting from what I'd found.

So I spoofed the system administrator's username (not hard on Win9x) and sent off a stern warning, which must've surprised them since suddenly all the messages stopped. :)

I installed a FTP server on the professors computer. It automatically shared your network disk once you logged in. All the COBOL assignments and solutions where there. Juvenile but hey....

I was in college in 2004 and for the engineering department email you had to log into a linux terminal and check your email with Pine. Most students by that time had windows computers with internet at home/dorm, I feel like it was intentionally difficult.

Did we study in the same university?

I was studying at a French engineering university and had that exact experience.

I loved learning all the weird command line tricks and Pine shortcuts :)

This was Engineering at University of Toronto

By that time I had Pegasus mail for windows in my work computer. I miss it sometimes.

My favorite gag-app would slowly drip letters off the screen

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