13 Jan
2018
13 Jan
'18
5:35 p.m.
> Although reduction in sneaker-net has virtually
eliminated boot-sector
> spread.
On Sun, 14 Jan 2018, Tapley, Mark wrote:
I never made that connection before! Glad you toed me.
There had already been some reduction. The first PCs with a hard disk
would always attempt to boot from floppy first. Once it was possible to
rearrange the boot sequence to try the hard disk first, we had a
substantial reduction in boot sector virus incidents.
MOST boot sector virus infections on hard disks could be trivially solved
by the [undocumented at that time] /MBR option of FDISK.COM
The "Alameda" Virus was first discovered [and thoroughly analyzed] in our
("Merritt College") lab.
(We had a good idea of who might have been the author)
One of the student workers at our sister college, "College Of Alameda",
who was brother of a guy who wrote a book on the subject, asked nicely for
naming rights.
A few years later, the administration informed me that they had waived the
computer literacy requirement for a student transferring to Yale. A few
months later, Yale "discovered" it, and named it "Yale Virus".