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

[Sean Conner]

It was thus said that the Great ethan at 757.org once stated:
> 
> 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.

  Memory protection does not protect you from a virus.  It can protect other
running processes from being modified (if they belong to other users they
can't be infected at all; other processes owned by the user it's possible,
depending upon the system [1]) but that's it.

  -spc

[1]	I would say "yes" in general---you do have to be able to debug your
	own programs and thus, intercept and modify a running process (at
	the very least, to set a break point).