Sorry Robin*
Burnley - 1987. Having just started at college, and found a pub, conveniently just down the road which would serve me and my colleagues beer, proceeded to enjoy playing Pool and generally having a good time. Not long afterwards, came some meeting at school for all the leavers, I don't recall the reason why ex-pupils and parents had to return to this, but we did. So I went.

I bumped into Robin*, let's call him, who had gone to Blackburn College to do the same course as I had started. Like Burnley, Blackburn had their own Prime Minicomputer, which students used for programming exercises, [and in our case at Burnley, storing BBC games on so we could play them from the BBC computers which we used as terminals to the Prime.]

Robin gave me his account details at Blackburn. This was his first mistake.

We'd discovered, at that we had access to a nascent network client for connecting to Prime computers at remote sites, called Netlink.

So, using Robin's account details, we successfully logged into Blackburn's Prime and had fun for a few hours talking to students there and spooling large files to what we thought was our printer at Burnley.

Except it wasn't, it was a Printer at Blackburn. We only had 1 Printer at Burnley, but at Blackburn, they had 2. All our prints were spooling to the System Administrator's printer.

Clearly, he wasn't very happy about this, and first pulled Robin into his office for a proper bollocking about "What the hell do you think you're doing?"
Robin knows nothing of this, it must have come as a hell of a shock to him to face getting kicked off his course because we were remotely arsing around.

Blackburn's Sys-Admin got on the phone to Burnley's Sys-Admin, a small but formidable dark-haired pitbull of a woman, called Denise. Now Denise had a temper at the best of times, but in this case turned positively incandescent with rage and stormed into one of our spod-labs determined to find out who'd been perpetrating cyber-anarchy.

No-one admitted anything, which of course sent her from "livid" to "volcanic"..

No-one was ever singled out or punished, but afterwards Denise watched us like a hawk and would suspend account logins if people even simply cleared their screens when she walked into a room.

Of course, similar things happened again when we took a visit to Lancashire Polytechnic. The difference being that in that case, they volunteered remote login details to us.


So, sorry for being a twat and almost getting you kicked out of college Robin...
(caescarna Hell's Roomba, Mon 16 Apr 2012, 13:59, 1 reply)

*click* for spod-lab

( Slippery Mick ‏, Mon 16 Apr 2012, 18:35, closed)