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

[Cameron Kaiser]

> 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.

Lest this turn into another chapter in Mac vs DOS:

- Yes, classic Macs did get viruses. But as a user of a classic Mac since
  1987, I think I encountered one exactly once and my experience was not
  unusual. They just weren't all that common and nearly everyone ran Virex
  anyway until Mac OS 8 days when the platform had little or no relevance to
  virus authors.

- You may not have had a command line, but it was perfectly possible to get
  under the hood. You could mess with resources in MacsBug or ResEdit, shuffle
  INITs and CDEVs, whatever you like. Such tools were easy to get and freely
  available. Whether you *liked* the resource/data fork split is a matter of
  preference but they certainly didn't prohibit mucking around by the
  knowledgeable and the structured nature of the resource fork in some ways
  makes it easier.

- No, pretty much everything was *not* just shareware/commercial. Look at
  UMich or Info-Mac for a nearly total refutation of your statement. Freeware
  existed in quantity commensurate with the platform's penetration and Apple
  certainly did not discourage it in those days. I have mirrors of them which
  you can check out:

	gopher://gopher.floodgap.com/1/archive

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  Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com
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