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

[ethan at 757.org]

> 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).