Even in the earliest days of the internet, people found ways to play very simple games online, and it was a lot of fun.

Of course, most people who could get on the internet back then had to dial in through a school connection since it wasn’t publicly available in most places.

That was the case in this story, and the university’s IT guy was tasked with stopping people from using their dial-up connections for online gaming. He took his role seriously and found a way to make an example out of one gamer that everyone learned from.

Read through this story to get a feel for how the internet used to be.

The dial-ups must only be used for schoolwork

Back in the early 90’s, I was attending a very large University in a Southwest desert state that’s known for this gigantic natural wonder in the northern part of the state.

The early internet was very different from what we have today.

I worked on campus in the campus network telecommunications department. At the time, the Internet was still mostly major universities connected together with some military and government connections (like the Lunar and Planetary Labs).

The world wide web was not a thing yet. And if you wanted to communicate with the other two universities in this state, your network traffic ran through my University because that’s how it was set up.

This must have been a very advanced system.

Thus, in the network telecomm department where I worked, we were tasked as the “overseers of the network”, and they didn’t mince words – all computer networks, phone networks, etc. were in our domain.

Back then, the University had several unsupervised terminal labs (three were 24-hour) where students could connect to their choice of university computers based on which department they were doing work for (popular choices were the Engineering computers, Comp Sci Unix systems, and Physics VAXen, but other departments had systems as well), and from there hop to their platform of choice.

The University also had supervised PC labs for work that required Windows or Mac applications, and those were heavily regulated. I only visited them once in a blue moon because those labs were under the control of a different department.

Even back then, there were places online to waste time.

In this time period, online bulletin board systems (BBS’s), multi-user chat (MUCks) rooms and multi-user dungeons (MUDs) were the biggest things going. Notes were posted in every terminal lab and every PC lab that gaming was unacceptable use of resources and that users risked losing access if caught.

“If caught.” Yeah, it’s pretty hard to police this stuff when the terminal labs are unsupervised to begin with.

As long as they weren’t causing trouble, people would ignore the gamers.

Now, we in the control center had direct access to all the terminals and could remotely kick people off whatever they were doing if needed. We were “empowered” by the bosses that if there were complaints about people gaming in the labs, all we needed was the terminal lab location and the terminal number and we could boot the user off.

(Of course, the user could always just move to another terminal, but the bosses didn’t seem to care that much about the details…)

However, not a lot of people complained, quite honestly, because why would they? The late-night gamers were in the lab when nobody was really around and they didn’t leave messes or anything, so who cared?

Gaming from home was cutting-edge technology.

Unbeknownst to most of the University population, we also had a bank of dial-up modems (at 4800 baud) for those students that liked to do their schoolwork from home – this information was not widely disseminated at the time.

We were (are still) a very large University with easily 35,000 enrolled at the time, but we only had a bank of maybe 50 (if that) modems. So, when word got out about the modem bank, naturally those late-night gamers began playing their MUDs from home instead of from the 24-hour labs.

This quickly started escalating, as we would get phone calls at 8, 9, 10pm “I am getting a busy signal when dialing into the modems.” Since we had to document every incoming phone call, the bosses started getting a little upset at the non-school-related use (abuse) of the modem bank.

Let’s see how this situation was handled.

Cue malicious compliance…

The bosses said: “Anytime you find someone playing games via the modem bank, drop their connection.” The very first night after that edict, a user called to complain about the busy bank.

I fired up my workstation and started checking the connections. Sure enough, I found three users playing MUDs almost immediately.

It is surprising that they can see exactly what the users are doing.

I remotely hung up their connections on two because they were just sitting there doing nothing – likely they were in mid-game and got up to do something else, like use the restroom – but the third was actively moving about in the game.

I watched him for a bit and realized that he was moving through a section of the MUD that was long and boring but he had memorized its path, so he had just typed “N N N N N N” due to the modem’s speed, so it would just scroll while his character moved. In other words, he was caching his moves to combat the speed of the modem.

What is he going to do here?

I couldn’t just let that one go without some fun. I noticed that he had found a dragon and was killing it over and over again and in between killings running back to whatever location to drop off all the goodies.

I waited until he was in the middle of whatever forest/maze/region he was trying to get through and I inserted a few commands to his list via the control center app – It ended up reading like this (my inserts are in bold):

This is just too funny.

N N N N E E N N E unequip all N E drop all N N E E N kill dragon

He never saw it coming, and he never saw the end because when he finally realized his character was not only NOT pummeling the dragon but getting its butt handed to him, he tried to run. Except that I wouldn’t let him.

S N S N S N S N …

He must have been so upset, but there was nothing he could do.

Eventually, I got tired of it and I kicked him off the modem bank but took over his connection to the MUD and let the dragon eat him. Then I made an announcement to the general MUD (as him) that I was giving up all my stuff and the first person to find it on the way to the dragon’s lair could have it all.

The guy did eventually log back on to the modems later in the evening – because y’know, they were busy – and found himself with absolutely no gear and no money.

And now he knows that it wasn’t a glitch or anything.

While he was messaging his in-game friends about how the game was screwing him over, I typed a message to his terminal directly:

“If you continue to use the University’s modem bank to play games, this will continue to happen.”

Problem solved.

He dropped his connection immediately. Pretty sure I ruined that guy’s evening. Buy hey, the boss said “No gaming via the modems.”

I heard word got around really quickly that “someone was spying on all the modems” and lo and behold, the 24-hour terminal labs had late-night gamers again.

Sure, it might have been mean, but the student was breaking the school rules, so he got what he deserved.

Read on to see what the people in the comments have to say about this story.

Lots of fond memories from back then.

They just needed more modems.

This commenter thinks they should have left the gamers alone.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a person who calls on dozens of whirlygigs to combat the neighbor’s complaints about the fence.

The sysops had a lot of power back then. Or so they thought.

Early gamers would be very upset about this.

The early days of the internet were wild, and a lot of fun. Of course, there was also a lot of frustration, very little security, and tons of problems, too.