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Fun Tandy story. It was the 80s. My parent bought a Tandy 1000 SX for their business. It worked fine for a while, until one day it started randomly crashing, a
by cmer 4y ago
Fun Tandy story.
It was the 80s. My parent bought a Tandy 1000 SX for their business. It worked fine for a while, until one day it started randomly crashing, and occasionally showing a little dot bouncing around the screen.
They took that thing to countless computer stores to have it fixed. Nobody could figure it out. Everybody said it was working just fine.
My dad got so fed up he bought a new computer and told me that if I could fix it, I could keep it.
And of course I figured it out! Turns out, it was infected with the Ping Pong [1] virus. One of the very first viruses. Certainly the first I had ever witnessed, or anybody I knew for that matter. That day, John McAfee got me a free computer!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ping-Pong_virus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ping-Pong_virus
- freetime2 4y agoGreat story! How were you able to diagnose the issue? I imagine it must have been quite a bit more difficult back then before the advent of Google.
- kragen 4y agoDownload the shareware version of McAfee ViruScan from a BBS, I imagine, and then maybe buy a virus cleaner? Or, more likely, make an illegal copy of one.
- cmer 4y agoIt’s been a while so I don’t remember. I was like 8 or 9 years old. I’m assuming someone somewhere told me about viruses and gave me a copy of McAfee. I remember when it all clicked though. All our computers started acting the same with the ping pong ball. The virus was spreading whenever I was inserting a floppy in an infected machine. I had a ton of floppies to clean.