Your roundabout logic is astounding. If I'm incorrigible, how are you going to help me? I mean even if I felt even a tiny bit of remorse for something I did 25 years ago that hurt nobody at all, which spoiler: I don't, and it's by far not the worst thing I or my friends did at school.
Now that I think back, I'm more convinced than ever that you're actually right. Or at least, maybe we even were a group of sociopaths.
Shared drives or folders are a joy, especially when they're buggy. Also back in school, since it was '96 and disk space was still at a relative premium, we had very small quotas for our users (first grade got an awesome 2MB, second graders 8MB, only in third grade you got a quota of like 100MB). The school used Novell DOS 7 with a NetWare backend at the time and had some computers with Windows NT 4.0 for students in higher grades. That combination also had some really weird bugs like when you set your password with Novell DOS 7 and exceeded a certain amount of characters it would work perfectly fine when logging on Novell DOS, but no longer with Windows NT 4.0. You had to log on with a Novell DOS client and change your password to something shorter.
That was a bug the entire class once used to make sure we don't have an exam because the hapless professor had no idea what was going on and had to wait unil support showed up. 😆
Anyway, each student group had a shared drive on the backend. When you copied a file there it would be subtracted from your quota, and the system subtracted the file size from the user who last saved the file, i.e. when you put a text file on the shared drive and someone edited and saved, it would read as that user's file and cost him space from his quota. Which was fine, I mean, at least you couldn't abuse someone's shared files to mess with their quota.
Or could you? Turns out that telling the operating system to open a file in append mode instead of write mode caused the operating system to leave the file owner alone, but freely allowed you to add content. Not only could you use that to make users have embarassing or questionable content on the share (as long as they had at least one file there, and we all did, if only to play multiplayer Quake during school time), but you could of course make them use up their entire disk quota, down to the last byte. Which caused all sorts of fun issues (especially when they were using NT to log on at the time, Windows never dealt all too well with a sudden drop in free disk space on the user's home directory).
We used that to regularily blow up someone's files to the point where NT stopped opening any programs, crashed randomly, the user had issues logging in, caused professors who had no idea what they were doing to try and help, only to quietly delete the file at some point where everything went back to working fine, and of course you could always use that to handily cause jocks and bullies to fail their exams. Ah, such a pity.
We had networked computers with a 10Base-T coaxial bus setup, so whenever we felt like the admin was an annoying asshat - which was pretty much always when he found out we hacked (well more like stole, by making a fake Novell DOS login screen that would run from your own user, would perfectly mimic three failed login attempts, write down the user name and password entered and then cause a crash that forced a reboot) a professor's password (because they had, for no reason, up to 10 GB of disk space and like NEVER used it, and it was impossible to install Command & Conquer in sub 8MB file chunks) we'd go around and stick pins through the network cables and cut the top and bottom part off with a wirecutter, which caused all sorts of funny network spasms. We started by removing termination resistors but that was way too easy to figure out.
Funny for us. Less so for the guy running around trying to figure out which cable was broken, while it was somewhat easy to calculate in which general vicinity the signal broke, it wasn't that easy to figure out which cable part was the actual problem. Especially when you can't see any obvious damage.
And then there was the time where we found out that you could actually write small programs that you could hook to an operating system interrupt that kept on running even after you logged out. Novell DOS apparently didn't take care to not allow useres to modify system memory at will. Needless to say, from that point on we ALWAYS made sure to hard reset any computer we were logging on to.
Looking back, I guess I can see why our teachers despised us - that were just the stunts we pulled on the network, not counting practical jokes like the one where we hid an entire classroom's furniture in its ceiling* or hid an entire week's worth of account group work in an envelope and wrote MAIL BOMB** on it and attached it underneath a table.
*Not a ceiling in the traditional sense. The school was a repurposed factory building with an added office complex, and therefore the ceilings were just really light, removable ceiling elements that covered steel braces, they EASILY supported to load of a couple of desks and chairs. So we just removed the ceiling elements, heaved the desks and chairs onto the steel bracing and put the elements back in place.
**That was in VERY bad taste. +1 points for sociopaths, ey?