Speaking of finger, console logging, and the 90s: when I was a freshman in college I took a Pascal programming course. We were assigned accounts on a cluster of AT&T 3B2 systems running SVR3. The students only had access to a terminal lab; the servers were upstairs, out of our reach.
There was no disc quota or significant restriction on the resources available to us, so I became a video game mogul. I found all the freeware download sites, and I became an expert on portability, tweaking and compiling game software to run on our idiosyncratic system.
As students, we made extensive use of "finger", "w", "who", and "write". We also knew the existence of "wall" and the like. So it was de rigeur for us all to write a little something into our .project and our .plan files. I took it much further, and discovering VT100 escape sequences, produced an animated .plan file which erased and mutated some of the immutable datapoints displayed, such as replacing my $HOME directory with "/" and some script-kiddie flexes like "I have root access... you know!"
Subsequently I explored the system extensively and eventually found /etc/passwd, and for reasons, attempted to "su" to every single account I found in there, most of them being system maintenance accounts. Due to logging and auditing, of course, these blatant, brazen failures captured the attention of the unseen administrator.
I received an email that made my blood run cold. The admin (and I still remember his name 37 years later) told me everything I had done in detail, and said that claiming "root access" was equivalent to telling airport officials that I was carrying a bomb. And there were no academic sanctions or threats in this email, but his veritable omniscience and dead-serious tone made me reconsider many of my life choices at the age of 19. Today, I am thankful for this guy putting things into perspective, that Unix was not just a huge game of Zork or Nethack, and he definitely inspired my career goal as systems admin.
There was no disc quota or significant restriction on the resources available to us, so I became a video game mogul. I found all the freeware download sites, and I became an expert on portability, tweaking and compiling game software to run on our idiosyncratic system.
As students, we made extensive use of "finger", "w", "who", and "write". We also knew the existence of "wall" and the like. So it was de rigeur for us all to write a little something into our .project and our .plan files. I took it much further, and discovering VT100 escape sequences, produced an animated .plan file which erased and mutated some of the immutable datapoints displayed, such as replacing my $HOME directory with "/" and some script-kiddie flexes like "I have root access... you know!"
Subsequently I explored the system extensively and eventually found /etc/passwd, and for reasons, attempted to "su" to every single account I found in there, most of them being system maintenance accounts. Due to logging and auditing, of course, these blatant, brazen failures captured the attention of the unseen administrator.
I received an email that made my blood run cold. The admin (and I still remember his name 37 years later) told me everything I had done in detail, and said that claiming "root access" was equivalent to telling airport officials that I was carrying a bomb. And there were no academic sanctions or threats in this email, but his veritable omniscience and dead-serious tone made me reconsider many of my life choices at the age of 19. Today, I am thankful for this guy putting things into perspective, that Unix was not just a huge game of Zork or Nethack, and he definitely inspired my career goal as systems admin.