24 Oct
2016
24 Oct
'16
11:20 a.m.
Early Macs definitely had viruses, a few that I got
from thrift stores
still have the viruses on them. I don't think there is any memory
protection at all. Software selection for MacOS was pretty crappy, and it
was hard to get under the hood. So protecting yourself from them would be
very difficult on the Mac platform. All the file fork BS, dev tools hard
to get. Also, just like the iPhone pretty much everything was
shareware/commercial, less community stuff than the PC. I feel bad for the
people that grew up on MAcOS versus MS-DOS.
Lest this turn into another chapter in Mac vs DOS:
- Yes, classic Macs did get viruses. But as a user of a classic Mac since
1987, I think I encountered one exactly once and my experience was not
unusual. They just weren't all that common and nearly everyone ran Virex
anyway until Mac OS 8 days when the platform had little or no relevance to
virus authors.
- You may not have had a command line, but it was perfectly possible to get
under the hood. You could mess with resources in MacsBug or ResEdit, shuffle
INITs and CDEVs, whatever you like. Such tools were easy to get and freely
available. Whether you *liked* the resource/data fork split is a matter of
preference but they certainly didn't prohibit mucking around by the
knowledgeable and the structured nature of the resource fork in some ways
makes it easier.
- No, pretty much everything was *not* just shareware/commercial. Look at
UMich or Info-Mac for a nearly total refutation of your statement. Freeware
existed in quantity commensurate with the platform's penetration and Apple
certainly did not discourage it in those days. I have mirrors of them which
you can check out:
gopher://gopher.floodgap.com/1/archive
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Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com
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