I’m old.

What I mean is that I can remember a time before computers were ubiquitous. Seriously, almost everything we have today is a computer of a sort. Cell phones, TVs, game consoles, etc. Who carries a watch anymore? There is no need when you have so much more in your cell phone: watch, mini-computer, internet browser, etc, let alone the ability to call anyone in the world where-ever you are.

I didn’t have a computer until I was about to head into high school. A brand new Commodore 64 graced my bedroom in the summer of 1984. (Thanks Mom & Dad!) Heck, I had to taking a typing class as a prerequisite before I could take grade 10 ‘computer applications’. Imaging taking a course to learn to type today.

Anyways. My point is that this was the early days of personal computers. I can guarantee that while there is a good change the local Universities had computer science curriculum, it wasn’t on any of my teacher’s minds as they passed through teacher’s college.

In high school, we had a three computer labs, and they were pretty open for those who wanted to learn. Our teachers wanted to learn too. And that was the difference. Norris and Evraire weren’t the coolest of poeple, but they didn’t hold us back. If we wanted to use some space on the 10Mb (yes, mega) file server in the Macintosh lab, then yes, we could take the equivalent of a floppy for ourselves. (You would believe how much better it was than doing the floppy shuffle every time you loaded Word…)

I don’t know if these teachers were merely lax, or knew that we’d be able to teach them quicker than they could learn on their own, but they let us get away with a lot of crap.

One of the labs was run on a semi-network of ICON computers. These beasts (you have to use the term beast when any machine had an integrated trackball) were running some kind of unix system of which we eagerly waged war with the administrators. Our job, get superuser access, disguise and keep it.

We would guess and social engineer the passwords. We would modify the password file to move new super accounts from the end of the list where they would be easily found. We would make sure our login prompt never started with a $ otherwise the jig was up.

The teachers would fight back, always raising the bar, but never really punishing us. Both sides were learning and we were all better for it.

Today, I think myself and many of my compatriots would we in jail, or under academic suspension, banned form touching a computer again until we left high school¹. I can’t see any way that this kind of behavior helps. Seriously, it will only cause resentment and either force students to loose interest in a valuable subject or send them underground.

Don’t misread me. We learned by doing our coursework as well, even if I was a dedicated slacker, but so much more was learned in those off hours when we could explore and hack around. As long as we didn’t break anything we were allowed to get away with so much more than my children will ever be able to. Back then there was so much to discover and I was lucky to be in a place and time where someone with curiosity wasn’t branded a criminal just because the educated staff were ignorant on a particular subject.

Many thanks to the St. Pius X computer staff from the late eighties. It was fun.