Wow, saw this headline today, apparently 20 years ago the Brain.A virus was first detected.
A flood of memories came back to me from that 'era'. At the time I was working in a computer retail store, we'd been doing a lot in the PC side with Amstrad PC's (8086 based beasties). I was big into the BBS scene (ran Wildcat, PCboard for a few years, even wrote up a crappy turn based BBS game called warlords in Borland Turbo Prolog). I also had an extremely dodgey phone line that allowed me 'cheap' int'l calls, and I became a member of BBS's such as the Hackers Den and Pirates Cove (legendery in those days).
One crappy wellington day, a southerly was blowing in (our southerlies come in off antartica, they can be quite nasty). It was just plain nasty. A friend of mine from BBS scene strolled in, a young geek with an awesome ability in assembler on the PC. We was a student at Vic Uni, which was a long walk for a poor uni student in shorts and jandals. At the time I had some PC gamer mag in front of me from the UK, with a big article from Dr Solomon about virus's. SJ was bored, so I said "write a virus", he agreed, but only if I brought him a bottle of coke from the bakery next door, and so he complied.
Less than an hour later he had coded a virus, and the cleaner, tested it and cleaned it. Amazing stuff. It was only ~414 bytes long, a work of art, and was designed to deliver a message once in seven boots ... "Your PC is now stoned". We each took a copy of the source, a master "infector", and an infected 5.25" floppy and filled it away.
6 months later once again I'm browsing a local computer rag, Computerworld I think it was, and there is a report of "Stoned" PC's at Otago polytech (other end of the country), I freeze as my eyes absorb the story realizing what had happened. I ring SJ and he freaks, a little investigation reveals his "master" disk is missing, his little brother (also a budding programmer) has a friend at Otago Polytech, turns out he swiped some disks including the master.
From there the thing spread like wildfire, across the world... amazing considering we didn't have the net available to the public like it is now. So this virus was spreading via sneaker networks.
Kind of makes me feel old.
This is all hypothetical conjecture of course
