Back to the 90s — Part Seven: Busted! When the Hacking Went Too Far

The end of the academic year was still two months away. We were all cramming for our end-of-year exams, but that hadn’t stopped the shenanigans our little unofficial hacking group continued to get up to.

Free Bus Rides

Take Manchester’s buses, for example. Back in 1994, they were mainly operated by GM Buses. One way to pay for your journeys was to use a prepaid card that resembled a cardboard bookmark. These were known as Clipper Cards because, when you inserted one into the clipper machine, it punched a square out of the left-hand side.

Once a certain number of clips had been taken, the card was no longer valid, and you had to buy another one.

Unless your name was Treffor.

He had worked out that by trimming the left-hand edge of a spent Clipper Card until it was flush again, then keeping the card pressed against the left side of the clipper machine as he inserted it, he could effectively get the same number of journeys for free.

You could only pull this trick off once, though. The card became too thin, which would inevitably arouse suspicion from the bus driver.

Still, it was a clever little hack.

But that was small fry compared with what Duncan had been getting up to on the college’s Novell network.

The Hidden Drive

Duncan had figured out how to create a hidden partition on the server that could only be accessed by issuing a particular sequence of commands. He wrote a batch file to access it and distributed copies on our group’s personal 3.5-inch floppy disks.

Whenever we ran the batch file, a temporary Drive E: appeared. It remained available until we logged out.

On this hidden drive were various utilities and games. I particularly remember Nigel Mansell’s World Championship Racing, which proved very popular among us.

It was an ingenious arrangement, and for a while, everything worked beautifully.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t to last.

Three Megabytes Short

Mr Etchells was a maths teacher, but he also doubled as the college’s system administrator. He was, to put it mildly, a permanently angry man.

One day, he attempted to install a new version of some maths software on the server, only to discover that there wasn’t enough disk space left.

In fact, just over three megabytes remained.

The first I knew about it was when I saw a red-faced Etchells marching down the corridor, fixing me with a freezing stare.

“Where’s Duncan?” he demanded.

I lied and said I didn’t know.

More to the point, how had Etchells worked out that Duncan was responsible?

I caught up with Duncan in the canteen and warned him about what was happening. Unfortunately, we were merely postponing the inevitable.

The Principal’s Office

The upshot was that Duncan was hauled in front of the principal, who was already at the end of his tether following our earlier swipe card hacking escapades.

He grilled Duncan for a solid hour.

After college, we all met up to discuss what had happened. Duncan was now facing the very real possibility of being expelled. In a last-ditch attempt to save his education, he was forced to restore the server to “how it used to be”.

The message from the college was clear: any further incidents involving anyone in our group would result in expulsion.

That was enough to get our attention.

For the rest of the term, we kept our noses clean.

A Change of Direction

Remember the list of subjects my mum had convinced me to take back in Part One?

Well, my grades were below par, and when the new academic year came around, I left for another college to pursue a formal education in computing.

As for Duncan, he passed his exams and went on to establish his own successful computing company before emigrating to Germany shortly afterwards.

Looking back, it’s interesting how differently things turned out for us. Our little group had spent so much time exploring the limits of the college’s technology that we’d occasionally lost sight of the consequences.

For Duncan, computing ultimately became a career. For me, it meant finding a different route into the subject I wanted to pursue.

And it all started with a calculator, a few floppy disks, and a little too much curiosity.

Back to the 90s Series