[cloudsec9]

The ICON was the first computer that I used that had a multi-user interface. Teachers were not trained well and "computer security" was not something that had yet seriously entered our language. While programming them for class was interesting, the real fun was trying to get "cool stuff" to work. We learned BASIC and Pascal in class, but we hacked C and wrote interesting shell scripts after our code worked. Kind of cool to see where it ended up (with BBY and all).

Are there any working examples still out there?

[wisemang]

Indeed, when I was in eighth grade we had “reading buddies” in the grade 1 class where older kids would go read the younger children stories. The teacher of the grade 1 class had an internal memo posted on the bulletin board explaining teachers’ usernames were their last name and password was their first name. So after I saw that I could get teacher-level access by knowing any teacher’s first name.

From there it was possible to trackball-and-ACTION-key my way to administrator permissions which is maybe what the bug referred to in GP was referring to?

Anyways my big mistake was sharing this information with my classmates — it was fun to change the login message for everyone to a kind of “so long suckers” just before we graduated, but apparently someone changed the admin password and (presumably due to not being aware of the bug) locked them out.

The vice principal had me come back to school after graduating to be chewed out and told that they nearly charged me with mischief :-/

When I got to high school I mostly just had fun finding a way to drop into the command line and playing around with that instead of working around access controls…