Archived viruses, was Re: Reasonable price for a complete SOL-20 system?

[allison]

On 10/21/2016 09:43 PM, Fred Cisin wrote:
>
> Certain college administrators declared that every machine that was
> infected would have to be destroyed; "it is impossible to remove the
> virus".  Have I mentioned a colleague whom they tried to terminate for
> removing machines from dumpsters?
> At UC Berkeley, agressive scanning was done in student computer labs,
> and "hundreds" of infected disks were found and DESTROYED.  ZERO
> copies were retained for ANY analysis.  Nor was even a count kept, nor
> followup to try to get students with infected disks to scan their home
> machines. 
Fred,

You nailed it, panic in the streets by people that should know better.

Back when I always though he was a criminal and behind it.

Also if anyone destroyed a drive or media with it it was out of shear
stupidity as a wipe/reformat
was all that was needed as the boot-block was not special it was just
another block on the media.
Floppies with it were bulk erased and reformatted.

My favorite formatter was my S100 crate with CP/M,  Its impossible to
give a single user OS
without background processing a virus.

I got a lot of free drives around then.  A few are still in use.

Allison