Malware history was: Spectre & Meltdown

[Chuck Guzis]

 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.

Cards that were mostly holes were called "lace cards".  Not uncommon to
see one punched (and offset if the punch had the feature) to indicate
the start of a punched output file--usually showing the file name or job
ID in "see-thru" fashion.

High-speed punches generally could be very noisy when punching lace
cards (or column/row binary) and prone to errors as they heated up.  I'm
thinking of the CDC 415 punch as an example, but the 1402 could put out
quite a racket as well.

Never tried duping a lace card on an 029 or 514. It doubtless would have
been noisy as well.

--Chuck