Back in 1999 while I was in high school, I played a goofy harmless prank on one of the school computers.
I created a 2-page slideshow presentation. Both of them had the same black background with grey text that appeared to be a DOS session indicating that Windows was deleted, except one had an underscore at the prompt. By telling the program to automatically advance the slides every second, and to loop the presentation, it gave the impression of a blinking cursor. It looked like a broken computer, but simply pressing Escape would get out of it.
Of course, it's worth mentioning that these were Macs, so they didn't even have DOS or Windows.
Anyways, a teacher saw it and thought I had hacked/broken the computer and sent me to the principal that didn't think it was funny and punished me by making me spend the second half of my lunch period with the school IT guy for the next 2 weeks so I could shadow him and see how much vandalism he has to deal with.
When I saw him the first time, he was like "Wait, what did you do?" and I recreated it. He thought it was funny as hell and thought it was ridiculous for them to act like I broke a computer.
We had a lot of fun hanging out. Even after my punishment was over, I still frequently went to his office to chat or walk around and fix computers.
I love that story, and that's actually such a fantastic punishment IMO (even if it was a bit unwarranted).
I did some similar harmless "hacking" in my high school that accidentally ended up crashing a major switch causing the whole schools network to die for the day. I told my programming class teacher right away, but unfortunately in my case the superintendent decided to press charges.
In the end all it taught me was to never never trust anyone, not exactly the best lesson for an already introverted teen to internalize...
Yeah, pretty sure I would have simply been suspended for pulling off the GP's prank. Maybe even expelled, but then parents would talk it down. Your event would definitely have me gone. Sorry your experience was like that.
Heh. I made a Visual Basic 6 program that showed a static screenshot of the desktop. I did this because I only got a few hours in the evening to use the family computer, but if i ever got up to use the bathroom my dad would "play one game of bejeweled real quick" that would sometimes end up taking the entire evening.
When I tried using it, he lost his fucking shit and went berserk.
I created a 2-page slideshow presentation. Both of them had the same black background with grey text that appeared to be a DOS session indicating that Windows was deleted, except one had an underscore at the prompt. By telling the program to automatically advance the slides every second, and to loop the presentation, it gave the impression of a blinking cursor. It looked like a broken computer, but simply pressing Escape would get out of it.
Of course, it's worth mentioning that these were Macs, so they didn't even have DOS or Windows.
Anyways, a teacher saw it and thought I had hacked/broken the computer and sent me to the principal that didn't think it was funny and punished me by making me spend the second half of my lunch period with the school IT guy for the next 2 weeks so I could shadow him and see how much vandalism he has to deal with.
When I saw him the first time, he was like "Wait, what did you do?" and I recreated it. He thought it was funny as hell and thought it was ridiculous for them to act like I broke a computer.
We had a lot of fun hanging out. Even after my punishment was over, I still frequently went to his office to chat or walk around and fix computers.