Hmm mischief on computers in school eh. Well I played around a bit but never did much harm "IN" school. I did afterall teach the only I.T. class (computers where a thing of the future!) the school had... OUT of school however, rather once I got to college, I became the second most prollific cracker on the most wanted list. I never did get caught, and courtesy of the statute of limitations and having long since cleaned up my act, I never will .
Then the internet came along... Oh you kids have it easy these days! Back then it was a revolutionary concept in education to network up all the computers in a single room, let alone connect them to the outside world! I think I was in the 4th year (I think you call it year 15 now? 2nd year before leaving unless you do the voluntary staying on thing) when my school installed it's first network. It was Novell Netware. I had full admin access of course, not that I was meant too, but if i'd played up i'd have made the class I taught a misery!
I did once write a little Turbo Pascal program to do the whole jet taking off sound thing (increment the frequency by 1 each loop) so when they switched all the computers on it was like standing on the apron at Heathrow and directing all the traffic to one spot.
Once I got out in the workforce I practical joked my boss with a batch file based joke-virus that pretended to scramble his file allocation table, it even made rogue access of the HDD (no read/write cache in those days), displayed a progress bar (in ASCII art) then clean removed itself from the HDD and overwrite the sectors on the HDD where it had sat, leaving only a (deleted) batch file that did the overwriting. It took my boss 2 days of full time study to figure out a guess as to how I did it. He said it was genius, but I should have been doing some work instead, and should not have risked his autoexec.bat and config.sys (don't ask).
I used to go into Dixons and write little programs that made the Spectrums look like they where loading, so people would come in and they'd see the demo computer was already loading a cool game (usually I did Elite) and would stand there waiting for it, but it never happened.... There was a RANDOMIZE USR command in Spectrum BASIC to do the squiggly loading lines and everything.
Oh and I once stitched a mate up who worked in PC World (look out Jakg!) with a boot up error message saying that "PC World Technicians don't know how to fix this". My mate, who was the technician in question, had to do a fresh install to remove it after the whole technician team spent days puzzling over it. After which I took great delight in telling him it was me That was just a simple registry hack.
Oh VNC on the uninitiated is fun too, did that one bored day back when I worked for some long since bankrupt corporatation, it was fun to watch the girls in customer services complain that their mouses where doing strange things, but funnier still when they started making rude typing errors.
Then the internet came along... Oh you kids have it easy these days! Back then it was a revolutionary concept in education to network up all the computers in a single room, let alone connect them to the outside world! I think I was in the 4th year (I think you call it year 15 now? 2nd year before leaving unless you do the voluntary staying on thing) when my school installed it's first network. It was Novell Netware. I had full admin access of course, not that I was meant too, but if i'd played up i'd have made the class I taught a misery!
I did once write a little Turbo Pascal program to do the whole jet taking off sound thing (increment the frequency by 1 each loop) so when they switched all the computers on it was like standing on the apron at Heathrow and directing all the traffic to one spot.
Once I got out in the workforce I practical joked my boss with a batch file based joke-virus that pretended to scramble his file allocation table, it even made rogue access of the HDD (no read/write cache in those days), displayed a progress bar (in ASCII art) then clean removed itself from the HDD and overwrite the sectors on the HDD where it had sat, leaving only a (deleted) batch file that did the overwriting. It took my boss 2 days of full time study to figure out a guess as to how I did it. He said it was genius, but I should have been doing some work instead, and should not have risked his autoexec.bat and config.sys (don't ask).
I used to go into Dixons and write little programs that made the Spectrums look like they where loading, so people would come in and they'd see the demo computer was already loading a cool game (usually I did Elite) and would stand there waiting for it, but it never happened.... There was a RANDOMIZE USR command in Spectrum BASIC to do the squiggly loading lines and everything.
Oh and I once stitched a mate up who worked in PC World (look out Jakg!) with a boot up error message saying that "PC World Technicians don't know how to fix this". My mate, who was the technician in question, had to do a fresh install to remove it after the whole technician team spent days puzzling over it. After which I took great delight in telling him it was me That was just a simple registry hack.
Oh VNC on the uninitiated is fun too, did that one bored day back when I worked for some long since bankrupt corporatation, it was fun to watch the girls in customer services complain that their mouses where doing strange things, but funnier still when they started making rude typing errors.