We never had school computers :(

I used them as a sort of thin client into a system that I had root on, so I could do whatever Science demanded of me without asking for access. Permitted, but certainly unexpected!

I would carry a USB stick that just had a VNC client on it. My home server was built from high-end scrap, and was leagues faster than anything the department had at the time, at least for student use.

I also had a Sharp Zaurus I had jury-rigged WiFi into, so I could run data analysis whenever I thought of something. It ran VNC or SSH. This was in the early days before it was called "machine learning" or even "big data". So we take this sort of thing for granted now (hello Google Cloud), but at the time it was magic superpowers to have immediate access to a machine with 4 physical CPUs from a handheld device.

Write a script to create an neverending amount of files. Piratinh games. Trick teachers into giving us their passwords. I could go on...

We installed Doom (1 or 2, I don’t remember) in an invisible folder and played via the 10Base-2 network. Those were the 90ies…

We installed Doom on a couple computers, this was in '97. Our computer teacher had absolutely no idea how we did it. Private schools were fun for running circles around the teachers.

So many comments are about such major things, where as at most I only really put ThePowderToy into the shared drive for student accounts in my junior year of highschool and once in my freshman year made a simple batch program that all it did was constantly open up command prompts but didn't do anything harmful.

Y'all did so much more interesting and worse things than I did, I swear

Installed ventoy to a 32gb flash drive, turned off secure boot and then load into any distro on the drive

Also had a persistent windows installation on another drive

Install NixOS on them 😈



Netbus 1.70 baby

Set up fork bombs to trigger at random intervals.

We could unscrew the chassis of the computer and take whatever hardware we wanted to lol. We never actually got anything but we'd remove the RAM or unplug a hard drive and put it back.

We also found games hidden in certain directories. I even saw someone playing Undertale.

I also found a torrent client running on start up on one of the desktops seeding some movies.

If it counts, we used a program to throttle other devices' WiFi speeds. I forgot what it was called.