Word: bulletining
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Froma Joselow was getting ready to bang out a newspaper story when the invisible intruder struck. Joselow, a financial reporter at the Providence Journal-Bulletin, had carefully slipped a disk holding six months' worth of notes and interviews into one of the newsroom computers when the machine's familiar whir was pierced by a sharp, high-pitched beep. Each time she tried to call a file to the screen, the warning DISK ERROR flashed instead. It was as if the contents of her floppy disk had vanished. "I got that sinking feeling," recalls Joselow. "Every writing project of mine...
...Journal-Bulletin's computer center, where Joselow took her troubled floppy, the detective work began immediately. Using a binary editor -- the computer equivalent of a high-powered magnifying glass -- Systems Engineer Peter Scheidler examined the disk's contents line by line. "What I saw wasn't pretty," says Scheidler. "It was garbage, a real mess." Looking for a way to salvage at least part of Joselow's work, he began peering into each of the disk's 360 concentric rings of data...
Since viruses can travel from one place to another as fast as a phone call, a single strain can quickly turn up in computers hundreds of miles apart. The infection that struck Froma Joselow hit more than 100 other disks at the Journal-Bulletin as well as an estimated 100,000 IBM PC disks across the U.S. -- including some 10,000 at George Washington University alone. Another virus, called SCORES for the name of the bogus computer file it creates, first appeared in Apple Macintosh computers owned by Dallas-based EDS, the giant computer-services organization. But it spread rapidly...
...Deaf from birth, Marc Hagen, 17, had just about given up on school when his mother brought home an Apple IIe with a modem and showed him how to dial into the 200 or so computer bulletin boards in the Minneapolis area. "It just turned Marc around," reports Dolores Hagen. "Now he can talk to Bangkok if he wants, and if you saw my phone bill, you'd think...
...While the industry has already encountered a legislative clampdown that could limit the use of dial-a-porn and party lines, investors believe legitimate caller-paid services have huge growth potential. "This is a hot, faddish business right now," says Chris Elwell, senior editor of the Information Industry Bulletin. "But it's only in its infancy...