Malware history was: Spectre & Meltdown

[David C. Jenner]

This isn't malware, but back in 1962 when I was taking a college class 
in assembly language programming for the IBM 709, my innocence led to 
the following.

Of course, I had, on the typewriter, for my high school years, always 
typed ' backspace . to get an exclamation point.  I did this in a 
comment in my first punched card submittal using an 026 keypunch.  The 
program was rejected, and I lost $0.25 from my lab fee.

So my first real computer program was a flaming failure.  Had to wait 
for the 029 to be emphatic in punching.

Dave

On 1/16/18 4:27 PM, Sam O'nella via cctalk wrote:
> Enjoying the virus/malware history as its always interesting to see what people thought. Tricks, boredom, etc cause interesting results.
> For punch cards i thought someone was going to mention punching all the holes and jamming the reader. I'm not sure if thats real but heard some folks had to check their opcodes or it could potentially lead to that or flimsy card integrity if not.
> Did anyone here ever see animal or other shared system malware? Animal was just a nondestructive trojan (other than potential to take up disk space) but interesting that someone would run a program that appeared unexpected in their home folder.
> -------- Original message --------
> (I'm unaware of any punch-card attacks, but trojans were possible when
> people used prior subroutines)
>