Looking back at this now it’s hard to equate the old school news report of the first computer virus with the uncounted lines of code that are sent out daily to harm entire systems in the current era. Even funnier than the appearance of the ‘virus hunter’ is the fact that the virus did no damage and didn’t eradicate any files. It simply replicated again and again and again without any malicious intent. That’s not a person looking to do damage, that’s a person looking to have a bit of fun and perhaps offer up a warning that they could strike at any time they want, or someone else could.
Just looking at the computers in this clip it was hard to imagine that those old gray boxes could have ever survived a single virus let alone the many that are so common today. One little hiccup in the system during those days seems like it was something that could have halted work for hours on end. But then again if a person knew what they were doing back then and knew how to contain and possibly remove a virus then it wasn’t that much of a hassle. But a virus at that time was a big deal since there wasn’t a lot in place to deal with them on a large scale it seems and anything other that what they were dealing with might have been too much for those at MIT to handle.
Computer viruses are nasty business since in reality they’re lines of code telling a system to do one thing when the user wants to do another. Back in the day they could have slipped in over a modem connection via the phone or through a corrupted disk that was plugged into the system. Since most people don’t use floppy disks anymore and companies have been set in place to secure the internet connections, viruses are still prevalent but there are checks to keep them out more often than not. Of course if you don’t pay for that privilege at times then you’re flying solo and your PC could be at risk since you didn’t want to chip in to protect it.
Back then 200 computers being infected was a big deal until they found out that nothing had been lost. Today 200 computers or devices being affected is a way of life. At some point we know that someone is going to try to infect our devices with a virus of some sort, which is why there’s software built in to protect against it. Most devices come with some type of basic protection that’s useful so long as it’s turned on and being applied. Back then however they simply didn’t know how to deal with it on a bigger scale yet and had to learn quickly so that their systems couldn’t be compromised. It seems accurate to state that were a computer hacker allowed to go back in time and upload a truly nasty virus that the future of computers could be in serious trouble.
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