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Great story, thanks for sharing :) There was a Windows for Workgroups computer lab at my high school. They had a DOS-based login, but accessing the DOS prompt

Great story, thanks for sharing :) There was a Windows for Workgroups computer lab at my high school. They had a DOS-based login, but accessing the DOS prompt from Windows was disabled. At one point, someone figured out that the login screen could be bypassed by pressing Ctrl+Break; the teacher found out and disabled that particular keystroke. But after hours of experimenting, I figured out that Alt+3 sends an ASCII character (0x3) that has the same effect. So we were back to playing games in the lab after hours -- they were often hidden in a folder named Alt+255 which looked like a space in DOS but was invisible to the File Manager in Windows. Good times :)

bashwizard 7y ago
That also reminds me of when I regularly used to visit our local library after school (junior in high school at that time) which had these job terminals (win95 boxes connected to the internet through a fiber connection) for people to use when looking for jobs. Apparently they disabled basically all keystrokes while the application ran so we could only use a trackball to navigate the job board web site and print. I never figured out how to just enable keystrokes again so I just unplugged the power cord, booted up in safe mode and edited autoexec.bat and uncommented the line for the application to autorun on windows boot up and rebooted. Free fiber internet and a lot of IRC for weeks to come! However one of the librarians came up to me one day and asked "aren't you a little too young to be looking for a job?" and I was just joking and replied "yeah well, it's rough times you know". She looked concern and then looked at the screen and said something like "What's your name? I don't think you're allowed to do that... I'm going to have to tell you to get up and leave now". I was indefinitely banned from using the computers and job terminals.

bashwizard 7y ago

That also reminds me of when I regularly used to visit our local library after school (junior in high school at that time) which had these job terminals (win95 boxes connected to the internet through a fiber connection) for people to use when looking for jobs. Apparently they disabled basically all keystrokes while the application ran so we could only use a trackball to navigate the job board web site and print. I never figured out how to just enable keystrokes again so I just unplugged the power cord, booted up in safe mode and edited autoexec.bat and uncommented the line for the application to autorun on windows boot up and rebooted. Free fiber internet and a lot of IRC for weeks to come! However one of the librarians came up to me one day and asked "aren't you a little too young to be looking for a job?" and I was just joking and replied "yeah well, it's rough times you know". She looked concern and then looked at the screen and said something like "What's your name? I don't think you're allowed to do that... I'm going to have to tell you to get up and leave now". I was indefinitely banned from using the computers and job terminals.