While a student at Carleton University (officially for Geography, but more in computer science), I joined with two friends to see if we could “hack” the university mainframe — a Xerox Sigma 7.
I don’t think the work “hacking” was yet in common use. We were just interested in seeing if we could do it, as a personal challenge.
Long story short, we succeeded in finding an unprotected super account that gave us access to everything. To prove our success, we printed out a list of every user account and password on the system, some 50 pages, at the blinding speed of 15 CHARACTERS per second. The task took about 5 hours. And because we each wanted a copy as our “trophy”, we ran the process simultaneously on three teletype terminals.
Since we didn’t have any sinister motives, we then bound the printout like a booklet, and made an appointment with the computer center director. He was understandably shocked, but we didn’t face any disciplinary action because we explained that our motive was to show the vulnerability.
He then told us that they knew that “something” was happening, because the entire system became very slow for those few hours. (This was in a time when computers were still quite primitive — the multi-million dollar mainframe had only 256MB of memory, and about 1/1000 the power of a typical smartphone of the 2020-era!) He also told us that with what we had accessed, we potentially could have altered student grades, or even run the staff payroll — and no one would have questioned it!
I believe my participation in this venture is one of the factors that led to the job offer a few years later, when I went to work for the computer center.
