and endlessly annoyed my computer teacher at school by circumventing any attempts he made to control student usage.
Trying to get around Internet restrictions was a fun little challenge! My family visited the London Wetland Centre when I was a kid, and there was a room with computers. There were no keyboards, to prevent users from navigating away from the centre's website of nature facts, but they hadn't considered the danger of allowing people to right-click. I just copied letters from the website and pasted them into the address bar in order to access fanfiction.net.
I've never actually used a MUD, but my dad had a book about hackers that mentioned them, and, as a kid, I thought they sounded really cool! (The book also made hackers sound pretty cool, to be honest.)
I was on that MUD when 9/11 happened, at the moment when someone in NYC on there said words to the equivalent of 'my god, a plane just hit the world trade centre' and then we spent all day trying to verify the survival of all the other NYC users.
Oh, wow, yeah. I remember confused and distressed messages on the Pokémorphs forums on 9/11; it seemed like at first some people thought it was a bombing. I didn't learn about it until I was home from school and the towers were no longer standing, so, while it was still an alarming and upsetting thing, at least it was something that was already over from my perspective; it must have been harder to watch it unfold.
(which is why my email acc is 'my first name' @ gmail.com, to the vague surprise of people who have asked me for it)
That's impressive! Mine is firstname.lastname at gmail, which is pretty good to have, but I'd definitely be surprised to meet someone who managed to get their first name alone. Unfortunately, I keep getting misdirected emails intended for other people with my name; I don't know if that's an issue for you!
no subject
Trying to get around Internet restrictions was a fun little challenge! My family visited the London Wetland Centre when I was a kid, and there was a room with computers. There were no keyboards, to prevent users from navigating away from the centre's website of nature facts, but they hadn't considered the danger of allowing people to right-click. I just copied letters from the website and pasted them into the address bar in order to access fanfiction.net.
I've never actually used a MUD, but my dad had a book about hackers that mentioned them, and, as a kid, I thought they sounded really cool! (The book also made hackers sound pretty cool, to be honest.)
I was on that MUD when 9/11 happened, at the moment when someone in NYC on there said words to the equivalent of 'my god, a plane just hit the world trade centre' and then we spent all day trying to verify the survival of all the other NYC users.
Oh, wow, yeah. I remember confused and distressed messages on the Pokémorphs forums on 9/11; it seemed like at first some people thought it was a bombing. I didn't learn about it until I was home from school and the towers were no longer standing, so, while it was still an alarming and upsetting thing, at least it was something that was already over from my perspective; it must have been harder to watch it unfold.
(which is why my email acc is 'my first name' @ gmail.com, to the vague surprise of people who have asked me for it)
That's impressive! Mine is firstname.lastname at gmail, which is pretty good to have, but I'd definitely be surprised to meet someone who managed to get their first name alone. Unfortunately, I keep getting misdirected emails intended for other people with my name; I don't know if that's an issue for you!