3 ms·

When I was a kid I had a Dragon32 and my little brother had an Amiga 500. I thought it was so cool with the demos and the sound but he was always getting worms

• b112 11mo ago
  Yup, heh. And you'd infect all your floppies if you just warm booted, and put in the next game. Flipping the read only tab on every floppy was the first thing I did, after my first infection.
• attila-lendvai 11mo ago
  there was a distinct floppy sound when the filesystem was updated after a write. i noticed my first virus pretty quickly, and even though i couldn't remove it, i could disable it in some files that i couldn't reproduce (no internet back then, and i was on the wrong side of the iron curtain as a child)
• squarefoot 11mo ago
  Yes, that was a real problem. The Amiga would access disks every time they were inserted to id them, but viruses too would use that feature to spread themselves; they would remain resident in memory (also after warm resets) then write themselves on the bootblock of every inserted floppy. Seeing the computer access every inserted disk was then normal, no way to know if it was for reading or writing, so back then I built a small device that would take the writing pulse on the floppy port, make it a bit longer and drive a beeper. If I then inserted a floppy and it started beeping that meant that floppy and the one I read before it were infected so that I could restrict the suspects list and clean them. It was very effective, built some for friends and also sold some of them on local listings.
  • ra 11mo ago
    Ha! that was genius of your younger self.