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The single best inspiration for me to become a 'hacker' of sorts was BYTE. Back in the DOS5/Win3.11 days there was an article about modifying command.com & io.

The single best inspiration for me to become a 'hacker' of sorts was BYTE. Back in the DOS5/Win3.11 days there was an article about modifying command.com & io.sys so that you could customize the files that were used to load the system. config.sys & autoexec.bat became (on my system) ipl.sys & ipl.bat (Inital Program Load) It made the system immune to any virus* [except TSRs] (keeping a dummy config.sys & autoexec.bat let me see programs that tried to modify those files, and generally scored a TONNE of cool points in my mind. It also taught me about "security through obscurity". This taught me that _MY_ hardware was mine to modify how I wanted. It gave me an incredible sense of power, and capability. * = well at the time I thought it did. =)

jandrese 4y ago
The computer viruses that were the worst in those days were the boot sector viruses. Stoned Empire Monkey and the like. They were so hard to remove from machines and spread like wildfire in computer labs.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- sobkas 4y ago
  > The computer viruses that were the worst in those days were the boot sector viruses. Stoned Empire Monkey and the like. They were so hard to remove from machines and spread like wildfire in computer labs. Someone left disk in floppy drive and you turned computer on? Have a nice bootsector virus for free(and then we had Chernobyl, it was fun). It only got worse with pendrives and autorun functionality in Windows. Even today corpo that owns me, blocks them from being mounted on dev machines.