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Viruses are everywhere. I even had one on my C64! Normally you type LOAD"$",8 to get the directory of a floppy disk, if you do this on an infected disk you got a reverse bar LOAD">",8,1 diplayed, like a normal disk command. If you load this, you'll get the directory shown. If you examine the disk with GEOS or an directory editor you'll find two additional files, named < and >. If you delete one of these files you couldn't read the directory with LOAD"$",8 anymore. I'm not sure, but I had a feeling this thing copied itself on other disks.The directory of C64 disks is very easy to manipulate, you can save ascii control codes in normal filenames, so if you save a BASIC program with the command SAVE"HI"+CHR$(147),8 every time the screen will be cleared if you're listing the directory. Another thing is, the Commodore floppy drives have it's own CPU, ROM and RAM which is independent from the computer. So it's always possible that the computer's RAM is virus-free, but the memory of the disk station is still infected.
A friend had the one-half-virus on this DOS machine, I think it was a 486. This nasty virus installed one half in the MBR, the other half was attached to any other file which was found. If the MBR was rewritten, f.e. by a virus prog which only checks the MBR, then all files on the harddisks aren't readable anymore...
On the Amiga viruses were mostly in the bootblocks on the disks which was 1K in size. Normally they didn't do any harm, but it was nasty, and the viruses spreaded heavily because at these times the disk copying and sharing was very common in school. The Amiga has an extreme good capability for reset-proof memory, so a virus could stay all the day in the RAM. Another Virus was the SADDAM virus which infected L: Disk-Validator, a tool which checked the integrity of a disk or harddisk. This tool was on any disk, so this virus wasn't funny at all. Since Kickstart 2.0 the DIsk-Validator was stored in the ROM, so the virus was outdated.
At these times viruses had cool names, Byte Bandit, Lamer Exterminator... today its mostly a stupid Win32/somethingelse.
2 Opteron systems: OSx86 10.5.8, Andy's 9.8.0 kernel, Asus A8N-SLI Premium, Opteron 185 o'clocked @ 2 x 2,95 GHz (2nd system 2.6 GHz), ATI Radeon HD2600XT 256MB Dual-Monitor 2x HP L2035, 4 GB RAM, Griffin FireWave as main audio device, Marvell + nForce LAN, Asus U3S6 USB3/SATA6 card, 5,5 TB harddisk, Firewire 800 card, Apple Remote + eHome IR receiver, 2x Wacom serial graphics tablet, Canon Pixma iP4700, Logitech Internet Navigator wireless keyboard/mouse combination.
My Audio stuff: M-Audio Transit USB (default audio), M-Audio ProFire 610, M-Audio ProFire Lightbridge (34 channels) using Creamware A16 ADAT converter • MIDI: M-Audio Midiman 4x MIDI interface • Behringer Audio Mixers: Xenyx 1002, Xenyx 1002FX, Xenyx 1202FX, Eurorack UB1002FX, Eurorack MX1804FX, Eurorack MX262A • FX devices: Lexicon MPX100 DSP, Behringer DSP-1000 Virtualizer, Behringer MiniFEX 800 DSP, Behringer Multicom Pro MDX4400 compressor • RETRO: MSSIAH midi/sequencer/synthesizer cardridge for the C64 (Dual-SID), Steinberg M.S.I. MIDI Interface for C64
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