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Back in college, the old AppleTalk protocol did auto-discovery, so you could open up the Chooser and see virtually all of the Macs on campus. A lot of people didn’t understand network security, or were lazy, so they’d share their drives with guest access.
This was way too easy, so for maximum deviousness and WTF’ery, I’d just make edits to a file here and there.
Reminds me on the days when Windows XP home edition had an Administrator account without a password and also had the drives shared by default. That got really stupid when the cable company in our country didn’t provide a router so a lot of home PC’s were connected to the Internet with a public IP without any protection.
So it was really easy to search through the IP range of the cable provider and have direct access to pretty much every file on such home machines.
Back in the day keyboard and mouse were connected to the back of the computer with identical (but color coded) PS-2 plugs.
Today one would expect that swapping two mechanically identical plugs would result in no major trouble - think USB - but back then COLOR CODES HAD TO BE OBEYED!
Or computer science teacher came to help when our PC won’t boot up, tried reset, tried reset again, fiddled with the BIOS, gave up.
That wasted more than halve the lesson’s time just for us to swap plugs back to working while he wasn’t watching.
Sometimes things simply don’t work when the teacher is around…
Aaaand thats why you have to start with the basics when troubleshooting. Even if no one has fucked around with the machine, make sure everything is connected properly.
To be fair – the error message right after the POST which was produced by switching PS-2 mouse and keyboard was more than cryptic and gave no indication what so ever on the real reason.
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…
