Word: viruses
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...March 2, when several thousand Macintosh owners turned on their machines, they were greeted by a drawing of planet earth and a "universal message of peace" signed by Richard Brandow, a friend of Davidson's and the publisher of a Canadian computer magazine. The virus did no harm. It flashed its message on the screen and then erased its own instructions, disappearing without a trace...
...what made this virus special was how it spread. Brandow, who collaborated with Davidson in creating it, inserted the virus into game disks that were distributed at meetings of a Montreal Macintosh users group. A speaker at one meeting was a Chicago software executive named Marc Canter, whose company was doing some contract work for Aldus Corp., a Seattle-based software publisher. Canter innocently picked up a copy of the infected disk, tried it out on his office computer, and then proceeded, on the same machine, to review a piece of software being prepared for shipment to Aldus. Unaware that...
...Peace virus capped a series of outbreaks that began last December, when a seemingly harmless Christmas greeting appeared mysteriously on terminals connected to a worldwide network owned and operated by IBM. Users who followed the instructions on the screen and typed the word Christmas inadvertently triggered a virus-like self-replicating mechanism, sending an identical copy of the original program to every name on their personal electronic mailing lists. In a matter of days, clones of the tiny program had multiplied in such profusion that they clogged the 350,000-terminal network like so many hairs in a bathtub drain...
...time bomb" linked to each computer's internal clock and set to go off on the second Friday in May -- Friday the 13th, the 40th anniversary of the State of Israel. Any machine still infected on that date would suffer the instant loss of all its files. Fortunately, the virus was eradicated well before May 13, and the day passed without incident...
Meanwhile, entrepreneurs eager to profit from the epidemic have rushed to market with all sorts of programs designed to protect against viruses. In , advertising that frightens more than it informs, they flog products with names like Flu Shot +, Vaccinate, Data Physician, Disk Defender, Antidote, Virus RX, Viru-Safe and 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...