PLATO was absurdly fun. Houston Independent School District had a single terminal at each high school I attended and screen time was highly coveted. To the point that a friend of mine would sneak into school early just to get on, which promoted the administration to put a lock on the phone. Undaunted and despite more than one '9' in the phone number, we learned to dial by rapidly flashing the switch hook to simulate a rotary phone dial.
Thematically the school administration putting in what seemed like arbitrary rules just inspired us to work even harder to get access.
HISD also locked down "author" mode which was required to write new programs (called lessons) in PLATO's programming language named tutor.
Someone eventually cracked the account owners password, which is how some people ended up with accounts with author rights. We ended up replacing the login program on HSEP's PDP 11/34 so we always had super user privileges and I managed to socially engineer privileged access to our CDC mainframe. My flashhook dialing buddy figured out the system operators had buried end of file characters in the system docs on the CDC mainframe and we were able to find lots of interesting new commands to run after that. Again, telling us we couldn't do something just inspired us more. OK, upon reflection we were just hacking anything we could get our hands on.
Frankly I couldn't tell you exactly how I socially engineered it any more but I managed to track down an oil company here in town that not only had a PLATO terminal but a printer and gained access to both over the summer. Needless to say this was an amazing coup for a high school kid who just wanted to do a little coding and play a few games, if I say so myself.
I no longer have the long rolls of yellow paper from playing TREK and other games on an ASR 33 connected to the CDC mainframe or indeed anything else from high school, but the PLATO dot matrix screen print of Labyrinth's start screen remains a treasured possession to this day.
Thematically the school administration putting in what seemed like arbitrary rules just inspired us to work even harder to get access.
HISD also locked down "author" mode which was required to write new programs (called lessons) in PLATO's programming language named tutor.
Someone eventually cracked the account owners password, which is how some people ended up with accounts with author rights. We ended up replacing the login program on HSEP's PDP 11/34 so we always had super user privileges and I managed to socially engineer privileged access to our CDC mainframe. My flashhook dialing buddy figured out the system operators had buried end of file characters in the system docs on the CDC mainframe and we were able to find lots of interesting new commands to run after that. Again, telling us we couldn't do something just inspired us more. OK, upon reflection we were just hacking anything we could get our hands on.
Frankly I couldn't tell you exactly how I socially engineered it any more but I managed to track down an oil company here in town that not only had a PLATO terminal but a printer and gained access to both over the summer. Needless to say this was an amazing coup for a high school kid who just wanted to do a little coding and play a few games, if I say so myself.
I no longer have the long rolls of yellow paper from playing TREK and other games on an ASR 33 connected to the CDC mainframe or indeed anything else from high school, but the PLATO dot matrix screen print of Labyrinth's start screen remains a treasured possession to this day.