And I’m all out of gum

May 20th, 2005 - 5:45pm

As E3 draws to a close, so do the soppy memories relayed from my keyboard. We were actually talking about this one the other day, it was the catalyst for the last few posts so why not include it here?

Back at high school, in years 11 and 12 (1995 and 1996) we had as much control over the computer systems as we needed. The administrator account — admin — password was batman. I don’t remember how we found it out, though I do recall looking over one of our teacher’s shoulders as he typed it; not sure if that was after we already knew it though. At one point, mid-year, they changed the admin account’s password. Pity though, that instead of renaming the administrator account to admin, they simply copied it. This meant that instead of using admin, we simply used administrator with the good ol’ batman password. The password for the Unix machine’s root account at Chisholm was toucan, if you’re interested. I definitely know I found this one using the same look-over-the-shoulder method. I initially thought it was topgun since the teacher typed it rather fast, but figured it out after a short while. A good lesson to make your passwords complicated and not real words! But I digress.

So what did we do with the system now that we had full control? Why, we installed (and played) games! In year 12, we played (for almost the entire year) Duke Nukem 3D (I expect the sequel will be played by my kids when they’re in year 12). Since the systems were running some sort of Novell Thin Client with Windows 3.11, all we had to do was to install a game in a directory once, and it was available to all!

Eventually, the teachers cottoned on to this, and started deleting the games. No matter, we starting using our favourite compression tool at the time — ARJ to compress the games as an archive. We would name the games things like dn3d.dll or win.dll and “hide” (i.e. move) them in the Windows installation directory. Then, we created batch files similarly obscured which extracted them to a directory so we could recover them when they were deleted.

But it didn’t stop there, since we didn’t want just anyone playing games, myself and another student wrote two similar programs in Turbo Pascal; these programs had a hard-coded password (that we’d change and recompile every few days/weeks) which had to be entered to execute a renamed .exe file. Of course, you could just rename the .exe and run it but we never told more than a few people about this.

Obviously we “beat” at least one of the teachers, because eventually he just let us play which ever games we wanted, even during class. The most popular games were Duke Nukem 3D (as previously mentioned) and Stunts. I remember at one point the Stunts password being schumacher, which was great, because even when people knew it they couldn’t spell it! Later in the year the shareware version of Quake was released; luckily the computers were Pentiums (I believe they were the 100MHz ones) so they could run it, unlike my home PC of the time.

As we have since found out, the teachers had no idea about our obscured games, even the next year! Stephan‘s younger brother, Simon, was told the “secrets” of the games on the school computers, and proceeded to continue our legacy.

That’s enough nerdy gaming memories for now. I have a lot more I’m sure I could tell, but I’m sure I’ve bored you all enough this week. It was fun for me, though!

Tags: gaming, history, memories, school