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A floppy filled with software worth thousands of francs: Techie can't take it, customs won't keep it. What to do?

Stuart Castle Silver badge

Back in the dark ages (well, early to mid 1980s, so dark enough), our school bought a state of the art (for then) computer network, We had a series of Research Machines 480zs hooked up to a RML 380Z, which was acting as a file server (IIRC). We also had a couple of BBC B's, which weren't really used much by this point. These stayed in one room for a year or so, then our computer teacher decided he wanted the network expanded to the whole building.

He knew that the head wouldn't give the funding to get a professional company in to do this, so, knowing we (as fifth formers) were required to get involved with a work experience project, either in the school, or in a company outside it, and knowing what geeks we were, he suggested to me and a couple of friends that we propose a project to extend the network. Which, we did.

I'm not great at Electronics, am happy enough installing sockets, but a friend of mine was a dab hand with circuit design. He designed and assembled dozens of sockets with dual BNCs (I know you can just solder on the sockets, but IIRC, he added noise filtering to each socket, I think he also added something that acted as a termininator if nothing was attached to the socket). It was a great project because not only did it contribute something to the school, we were also required to install sockets in every classroom in this building. This involved a *lot* of drilling. Something which we tried to minimise for most teachers, but every one of us had at least one teacher we hated. They got the full force, as they'd been ordered to co-operate by the head, so they couldn't stop us.

It took about a week to do this, and at the end of the project, we were testing the network. OK, so network gaming wasn't really a thing, so we couldn't have had a multiplayer game, but we tried various games we found on the server (that I don't think we were supposed to know about, but we discovered that by flipping a couple of dipswitches on the back of the 480Z, we could make it an Administrator's machine). We also found a chat/messaging application. We'd taken a couple of 480zs, with their monitors to different rooms, and tested the network. We fired up the chat program on both machines and started chatting. Then, my friend started typing something to the other machine, pretending to be the teacher. He got a response along the lines of "Why are you pretending to be me?", which we took to be a joke. Unfortunately, the teacher himself turned up a few minutes later, having actually typed the message himself. Note: There were only about 20 rooms in the building, 1 of which was already the computer room, so it's not beyond the realms of possibility he just went door to door.

We all got a bit of a bollocking, but my friend, who had actually changed the ID of his workstation to appear to be an Administrator, and did pretend to be the computer teacher, got a detention.

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