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You lucky young folk! In MY day the Apple IIe didn’t have CD, mouse or network! Pranks were pretty limited...



My 2nd grade teacher accused me of "hacking" the Commodore 64 when she caught me showing another kid how to write a "what is your name" program. (Of course this same school unplugged all their C64s on Michelangelo Day so you can guess their level of tech training.)

I never did it at school but there was always the "fake prompt" trick. Do a few fun things -- throw up fake syntax errors (including transposing characters the user typed correctly) -- print out some rude error message or "formatting drive..." -- and then silently hand control back to the real shell.


You’d be surprised. I bet my elementary school teacher that I could hack their floppy based “email” system once. She felt confident since it had an administrator password.

I figured out that if you removed the floppy before you tried to log in, it would assume you were setting it up for the first time. Then you enter in a new password, put the floppy back in, and hit enter. It overwrote the admin password and poof. “Hacked”. She was not happy. I wish I could remember more details but as you can relate it was a long time ago :)




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