Contents
Online Games
QuakeWorld
A funny thing when QuakeWorld came out was that unless you knew how to use special font-chars in the game (and you were on a server which supported it) - then your name was in a default white-or-orange font. The capital O looked extremely similar to a numeric 0. Thus, if you ended up on a server where someone had a name involving either character, you could "speak" for them.
The trick was QuakeWorld didn't show when players renamed themselves. Thus, you could open your console - let's say you are "Veritas" and - maybe to pick on someone named "Omnibus" - do like:
/name 0mnibus; /say "I just wet my pants!"; /name VeritasAs an at-the-time 12 year old, this type of (what the net would now call trolling or griefing) was absolute fun when used conservatively.
Windows
Start-Up Programs
When assisting a teacher to wire up a new "lab" at my highschool, the teacher had advised me that in turn for wiring up the workstations and printers that as payment I would not need to do the courses "computer learning" work, as my assistance proved I "already knew more" than that portion of the course required. Imagine my shock when I then received a poor grade for not completing the work (which I was told I did not need to complete).
So, I logged into the "student" account on each workstation, went to (vague memory now - ~25 years later) "Applications" or "Program Files" and dragged every .exe program present into the "StartUp" directory. The next time each machine was booted, it would promptly try to launch every application installed - making most of the machines just crawl until they eventually crashed (ah, the joys of Windows 95/98).
It became an important enough issue on the school campus that they were "looking for" the "hacker" who had "destroyed" the school's new computers. I found it hilarious when the "computer" teacher who had required a student's help to wire up some PCs and printers couldn't figure out why these machines were opening all their applications and crashing. Eventually things quieted down and that same backstabbing teacher ended up manually re-installing each machine to "fix" them... then meaning they also had to re-do the installations.
