24 Oct
2016
24 Oct
'16
9:58 a.m.
But, I was explicitly referring to the time BEFORE
OS-X! (<1999?)
Assholes who proclaimed themselves to be "experts" kept pushing our college
administration to SWITCH ALL of our our student computer labs from PC to Mac,
mostly using the LIE that "Macs are immune to viruses".
Jumping in here late. When I was much younger I remember being on BBSes
that were H/P/A/V (Hacking, Phreaking, Anarchy and Viruses.) The first 3
just being old textfiles that are lovingly preserved by people like Jason
Scott. We had a local guy that shook up the DOS Virus group NuKE. Later he
became a coworker.
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.
I *DO* remember that in the local BBS wars, people who were toying with
MS-DOS viruses would make them then submit them to the AV companies to get
them on "the list." The huge list of viruses that the software would
defend against. But in reality, they were never in the wild. I think there
was at least 8 of these from one author who was just a bored Navy guy. So
take the # of viruses with a grain of salt. But BBSes did have collections
of them, and I'm sure you can still find the huge zip files of them
somewhere.
There were utilities like Virus Creation Lab that had checkboxes and would
crap out assembly code or something that you would then take the output
over to MASM or the Borland Assembler and compile. So who knows how many
of the DOS viruses came from this.
I remember doing a lot of BBSing, and trading stuff with friends and never
saw a virus. There was a case where the computers at Sears had the stoned
virus or something and everyone in the area was excited to go over there
and get a disk infected with it.
Of course BBSes always had the virus scan door. Ahhh fprot. And also the
zip files that never stop expanding :-)
Oh and the local guy that was involved at a high level with the DOS Virus
group, he said at a party that had a bunch of DOS virus authors John
MacAffee was there partying with them. No proof and he probably wouldn't
admit saying that today (was told to me in the early 2000s).