In 1993-94, when I was in tenth grade, I was put in the touch-typing class at my high school. My memory is a bit foggy. I remember having two typing teachers that year. The first was a strict and stern older man who always wore a tie. I believe his name was Mr. Smith. Under him, in a room full of electric typewriters, we learned to put our hands on the home row and type without looking down at the keys. If we made a mistake, we used correction tape to fix it.
Things progressed thus from September to December. In late December, we went down for the two-week Christmas Vacation. Christmas and New Year’s passed and it was now 1994. On the first day back, my classmates and I approached the classroom, ready to type away on our clunky old typewriters. Thus, one can imagine all our surprise when, upon entering, we found that the typewriters had been spirited away over vacation, to be replaced by a room full of computers!
I remember it like it was yesterday: row after row of IBM PS/2s (I believe Model 25 or 30) stared expectantly at us as we stared back at them, gasped in surprise and talked among ourselves. Suddenly, it wasn’t 1994 anymore; it was the future!
Now of course, 30 years into said future, I realize how primitive those machines were. They were 286s with no hard drive, and I don’t even know how much RAM. These machines had less power than a modern smartwatch. They booted off the A:\ drive if you had a boot diskette, but were really meant to boot from the LAN, which was running ICLAS on Novell Netware. This software allowed the machines to boot remotely and access programs like WordPerfect 5.1, which normally loaded in DOS.
With the new computers came a new teacher: Mr. Freeman. He was the total opposite of Mr. Smith. Instead of strict and stern, he was kind and easy-going. Maybe too easy-going, as we shall see.
Life in Mr. Freeman’s class was different from Mr. Smith’s. He would give us our assignments, then disappear for the rest of the class. As soon as Mr. Freeman left, we would change the classroom TV’s channel and watch The A-Team. One of the senior girls would get up and walk around on the tables. Altogether, it was a rather laid-back environment. Maybe this was the cause for what happened later…
Mr. Freeman gave us each a student account, consisting of our ID number and a password. I remember logging in on a screen with a blue background, red foreground, and bright yellow letters. After logging in, we chose what to do from a text menu with letter shortcuts; no mice on these machines!!!
This was my first time ever having an account on a network and being able to save my documents remotely, to be retrieved later. Up until then, I’d always used a diskette. So, what did I do with this newfound ability? I abused the hell out of it! Now, to be clear, I did do my typing work and save it as I was supposed to. However, I also typed and saved lots of stuff on the side: personal documents of poetry, observations, stories, and who knows what else. Did I know that I shouldn’t post personal stuff on a school account? I honestly don’t remember.
At any rate, I typed and saved whatever I wanted, until one day, some other students approached me with a piece of paper with what looked to be names and passwords on it and told me they needed my account and password because the teachers had told them to collect them. And like an idiot, I gave up my info to them!
That’s right… in 1994, I became the world’s first phishing victim! OK, probably not the first, but “phishing” hadn’t even been coined yet! So it was pretty damn early.
The next day, when I logged in, I found all my files had been well… defiled. (Sorry. I had to). All my poems and observations had been turned into satanic verses, etc. I got called into the teachers’ room and questioned. I admitted to typing personal documents on the school LAN and that I’d given my password to those students.
Fortunately, the teachers believed I was the victim of a malicious prank, and I believe suspended the students involved in it. However, I was given a firm talking to, which consisted of three points:
- Passwords should never be given to anyone who asks for them. Admins don’t need to ask users for their passwords because they can get into the users’ accounts without them.
- School computers are for schoolwork, not for personal stuff.
- Nothing one types on a computer is ever truly private, even when supposedly hidden behind a password. One should never type into a computer anything one wouldn’t want their grandmother to read in the newspaper the next day.
I think I learned those lessons well and took them to heart because I don’t remember having any more problems after that.
I don’t know what it was about that class or those machines, but they triggered something in me by opening my eyes to a whole new world of possibilities. I’d been using computers in school for as long as I could remember, but those old Apple machines were just part of the furniture. The PS/2s, by contrast, were new and exciting.
I enjoyed using them so much that (I think) Mr. Freeman suggested I take the computer classes at the tech school when I became a junior. That’s just what I did, but that’s a story for another time.
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