Early Days On The Antivirus Front: A Personal Perspective

An antivirus programmer reminisces about the people and organizations that were pivotal in the earliest days of the war against computer viruses.

I first thought computer viruses were a pretty cool concept. They had great names like the Brain virus, the Jerusalem virus, the Friday The 13th virus, the Typo/Fumble virus, and the dBase virus, and they did really cool things such as self-replicate, cause typos, or encrypt database files all without the permission of the computer user.

True, some viruses did unpleasant things, such as delete executables when run on a certain date, but it was almost cute. Then viruses were discovered that did truly awful things such as erase your hard disk and all the contents thereon. Suddenly, they weren't so cute anymore.

It was the mid-1980s, and the computer revolution hadn't really started yet. A simple MS-DOS computer with monochrome monitor cost upward of $3,000, hard disks were measured in tens of megabytes, and hefty systems sometimes had as much as 256K of memory, which was fine for that new-fangled Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet program. Networking Pipeline | Early Days On The Antivirus Front: A Personal Perspective

Linked by shanmuga Friday, 7th July 2006 3:28AM