Word: viral
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...last count, more than 25 different viral strains had been isolated, and new ones are emerging nearly every week. Some are relatively benign, like the virus spread through the CompuServe network that causes machines equipped with voice synthesizers to intone the words "Don't panic." Others are more of a nuisance, causing temporary malfunctions or making it difficult to run isolated programs. But some seem bent on destroying valuable data. "Your worst fear has come true," wrote a computer buff in a report he posted on an electronic bulletin board to warn other users about a new Macintosh virus...
...Retro-V. "Do computer viruses really exist? You bet they do!" screams a press release for Disk Watcher 2.0, a product that supposedly prevents virus attacks. Another program, VirALARM, boasts a telling feature: it instructs an IBM PC's internal speaker to alert users to the presence of a viral intruder with a wail that sounds like a police siren...
...perhaps inevitable. A virus that struck Lehigh University quickly got tagged "PC AIDS." That analogy is both overstated and insensitive, but it stems from a real concern that the computer revolution, like the sexual revolution, is threatened by viruses. At Apple, a company hit by at least three different viral strains, employees have been issued memos spelling out "safe computing practices" and reminded, as Product Manager Michael Holm puts it, "If you get a floppy disk from someone, remember that it's been in everybody else's computer...
...colleagues were aghast, but the secret was out. And the revelation was further compounded by Dewdney's landmark article in the May 1984 issue of Scientific American, which described Core War and offered readers who sent $2 for postage a copy of the guidelines for creating their own viral battlefields...
...control software. A typical vaccine will surround those memory locations with the equivalent of a burglar alarm. If something tries to alter the contents of one of those cells, the vaccine program is supposed to stop everything and alert the operator. But because there are so many different viral strains out there, vaccines are often ineffective...