semi vandalism
I was once studying on a very primitive network at school, a load of BBC micros (or something like that) connected to a printer. Was not really taking much notice of what the teacher was saying, but typed in what I was told.

Then completely lost interest, and typed in a few of my own commands;

10 print "fuck off ";
20 goto 10

Turned to my mate sitting next to me, and said 'hey, check this out'. Run the program, nothing happened. Nothing . . . Meantime, two other things did happen.

Printer goes beserk.

Teacher goes to printer, looks at what's happenening and bellows 'Who is station 11???'. Well, seems the stuff I was typing earlier, which I wasn't paying attention to, was to set all screen output to the printer.

Fuck off Fuck off Fuck off Fuck off Fuck off Fuck off Fuck off Fuck off Fuck off Fuck off Fuck off Fuck off Fuck off Fuck off Fuck off Fuck off Fuck off Fuck off Fuck off Fuck off Fuck off Fuck off Fuck off Fuck off Fuck off Fuck off Fuck off Fuck off Fuck off Fuck off Fuck off Fuck off Fuck off Fuck off Fuck off Fuck off Fuck off Fuck off Fuck off Fuck off Fuck off Fuck off Fuck off Fuck off Fuck off Fuck off Fuck off Fuck off Fuck off Fuck off Fuck off Fuck off Fuck off Fuck off
( Not Pineapple anymore, Mon 11 Oct 2010, 11:49, 2 replies)

Way back in the computer stone age
I'm talking sometime around 1975 here. Our school had a teleprinter connected to the local Polytechnic's computer centre, so that we could run little BASIC programs on their mainframe, and see the output chatter onto the fan-fold paper. Wow, we were pretty advanced for the time!

Of course, we had a Computer Wizard, name of Quentin. He was in the year above me, the first to have this computer access. He did the same trick, in this case "Mr Jones Is A Wanker" (where Mr Jones was the computer studies teacher) on an infinite loop.

But he was a Wizard, so he'd done two other things:
1) disabled the BREAK button, so it couldn't be stopped from the teleprinter;
2) sent the output to EVERY TELEPRINTER CONNECTED TO THE COMPUTER - which meant every school, every office and every lab, right across the whole town, and probably further.

The guy was a legend!
(moon monkey is busy making memories worth repressing, Mon 11 Oct 2010, 12:28, closed)

When I was 10 I used the school BBC Micro to print
"Liberal Democrats are cool"

This was because my aunt was running for MP and not because I understood anything about politics.

I left it in the printer and thought nothing more of it until several hours later when I was dragged from the play ground and told I was being taken to the headmaster. I still had no idea what was going on as I hadn't done anything wrong that day. I stood in front of the Headmaster and was given a bollocking and had a 15 minute explanation about why it was important to not air my political views in a school. I didn't understand a bloody word they wre saying and I didn't even know what a political view was. All I knew was that My aunt was cool and my aunt was a lib dem, Therefore lib dems must be cool.
( Peej, Mon 11 Oct 2010, 14:57, closed)