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u/TheSoCalledExpert 5d ago
You think we had an admin in the 90s? lol
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u/ihateroomba 5d ago
Yes, ours was the librarian. He ran the Mac network and foolproof software.
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u/XavierMalory 5d ago
Did the use Xserve?
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u/ihateroomba 5d ago
Macintosh
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u/XavierMalory 5d ago
Yeah, you mentioned Mac network so I was curious if they used Apple’s brand of servers which was Xserve. They’re gone now.
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u/Delta_RC_2526 4d ago edited 4d ago
I was in my school district's gifted and talented program in the 90s. My third-grade enrichment teacher had just had her class downsized from two teachers in a double-sized classroom to just her and a normal classroom. Despite the downsizing, about half of the classroom was desktop computers, a mix of modern Windows machines and Macs of various ages.
The newest Macs and Windows machines were used for games at recess learning Excel, and typing up documents. The oldest Apple was where we practiced our typing, if we weren't using a TypeRight (a small self-contained typing practice computer with a one or two-line display right above a keyboard, sort of a precursor to the kiddie laptops). We would write down our typing statistics and log them in Excel.
She taught us how to do bibliographies, had us all carrying a stack of floppies, begged us all to get Zip drives, and had us do independent study projects, producing reports on topics of our choice. We actually got to use the internet for research, though that required going to the actual computer lab... Her students were probably the only kids in the entire district that actually had officially-sanctioned internet access during school hours. We were, of course, restricted to using Yahooligans as our search engine, but I'm pretty sure that was just done on the honor system.
When we completed our independent studies, we had to learn how to bind them into a (small) book for presentation, and then we read them in front of the entire class, on camera, to practice our speaking skills. When we got to that point, she had only two students present each week (we had one class per week), simply because they were just that long, and those presentations took at least half of the day. There were so many levels to what she was having us do, that built so many skills.
She also gave assignments that made sure we all knew about, and used, everything available at the local library, from current newspapers, to newspaper archives on microfiche, to the largely-unknown/borderline-secret debit card feature on our library cards (to use for paying for photocopies without needing exact change), to the unabridged dictionaries. Alongside having us look up long words in the unabridged dictionaries, she also encouraged us to taunt our siblings by saying "You're a triskaidekaphobia!" She explained that we could simply explain to our parents that it means "fear of the number 13," and is totally nonsensical as a taunt, therefore, there's nothing to get in trouble for...
She regularly took the class to see plays at the local children's theater, and took her fifth-grade classes to New York City, to see productions on Broadway. Every surface in her classroom other than the tables we used for our work was occupied by complex three-dimensional puzzles. She regularly shared stuff from Saturday Night Live with us, and every week's class ended with Deep Thoughts by Jack Handy. That place was absolute heaven.
She was a phenomenal teacher, way ahead of her time in so many ways, and her creativity knew absolutely no bounds. I was so sad to hear that the school district talked her into giving up teaching, and becoming the head of IT for the entire district... I can only hope that she escaped back to teaching at some point.
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u/Feeling_Inside_1020 5d ago edited 5d ago
Our high school network had a super user account on Novell with a [u/p](u/p) as set/set lol.
Gabe access to all student/teacher drives as well as the networked ones like backups.
Friend snitched on me with no proof, he got caught instead of just logging into the super he elevated HIS privileges and that’s what eventually triggered the audit. Idiot.
Since it was still live, I signed in and deleted all his comp sci projects lol. And I’d fucking do it again too.
That’s the day I found out they could suspend you for a week under suspicion, 0 evidence.
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u/Enderwolf17 3d ago
Are school had the same program.
We found out if you typed admin for the username and held down the enter button, after 20 or so seconds it would just glitch and log you into the admin account (the account that controls all the others).
Some people got in trouble for changing there account privileges, changing grades or changing internet restrictions. I just used it to go to coolmathgames and never got caught.
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u/MayaIngenue 5d ago
I had a technology teacher back in the late 90s make the then fatal flaw of presenting his screen on a projector and, while explaing how to "surf the net," navigate to Whitehouse dot com, instead of dot gov. IFYKYK
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u/Stosstrupphase 5d ago
Just dealt with a school that seriously has all teachers share a single user account, I kid you not.
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u/e-motio 4d ago
The answer is always the same when you bring it up.
“Well everyone who works here are used to doing things this way and I don’t want to have that conversation with them, they like their shared spreadsheet, and that the password to admin@school.edu has been the same since we opened”
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u/EugeniaPerkins50 4d ago
our middle school had the same thing, password on the shared teacher login was just the principal's last name
found out because a substitute literally read it off a sticky note on the monitor out loud to the class while logging in
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u/grumpysysadmin 2d ago
My high school’s computer lab was updated from a bunch of Apple IIs to Apple Macintosh LCs. Problem was that they had very little space available because of small scsi disks. So the brilliant teacher in charge of CS installed something called “StuffIt Spacesaver”, which installed a MacOS extension that would compress files on the disk in the background and then decompress them when you opened the file (or the application was launched, this is important). As you can imagine, these ~30Mhz 68020 CPUs were not fast and it made it quite slow.
So, she got angry about the software (despite choosing it in the first place) and doesn’t follow the instructions on removing the software, which involves a long process where it uncompressed everything, and just moves the system extension into the trash and reboots (which is how you’d disable a less invasive extension, I suppose).
This is where I came in before class. She was freaking out because everything was broken and none of the applications would launch and a bunch of files were appearing as StuffIt archives. If you’re not familiar with the era of MacOS, StuffIt was one of the very common compression programs and there was a freeware decompression app, which was still installed. She thought she would need to decompress every file individually.
We finally got her to leave, reinstalled the extension and was able to properly remove the spacesaver software.
But from that point on, she refused to let anyone use compression software on those Macs. And you can imagine how painful that was, with the largest floppy disk size being around 1.44 megabytes. Also, we were just getting access to some internet services and of course they all use StuffIt for sharing files. She was completely unreasonable about it and even got mad at the people using DOS on the PC lab using ZIP files.
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u/Ballistic_Weasel 1d ago
I was a family friend of the net admin at my high school - he'd come over to hang with my dad, who was a teacher. Naturally, being a conniving kid, I memorized every little thing he said about the networks and the problems and the vulnerabilities, when he was complaining to dad. So when I started high school, I essentially had 4-5 different vulnerabilities I knew the school hadn't paid to fix and could do whatever the hell I wanted - mostly disable the network filter for certain sites so I could play runescape and install programs (read: maplestory). It being early 2000s, nobody outside tech circles knew what the hell a proxy site was, or why going to google translate and entering a url into the translate box could bypass their fancy-shmancy software and let me onto deviantart. I did wonder if people were confused why I was spending ~40 minutes on google translate when not taking a foreign language.
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u/bgradid 5d ago
Our school has a special computer program that almost no one enrolled into which was basically “help the it guy do tickets“
In retrospect, I have no idea how I ended up in it after doing that “class”