John Oram wrote: > Re: DOS virus - Day I can assure you that there were many DOS viruses > because we saw them on my clients PC's as well as our own when we ran > the clients software. It also took some time to figure out what the > heck they were circa 1984.
The only virus that I ever had to deal with was in the boot sector of an install CD. But even so, all it could do was make a copy of itself on another drive. Big deal. It could not trash my file system or fill the drive, or do anything to the way that DOS apps ran. But I dont run a network, so I dont have the problem. Even all those years on the BBS nets. Maybe I was lucky, or maybe it was just cause I wasnt interested in the latest games or gimmicks, but used the interface as we do here, to read and write messages. I dont care what kind of virus was on the BBS backbone, all that got to my desktop were plain ANSI messages. Nothing you could send me could sabotage my platform. If you sent an attachment, it only took a second for a DOS Fprot or whatever to have a look at it. Dos programs are so much smaller it was much harder for hackers to design anything that would fit into them. I doubt very much if any of the saboteurs around today would have the skill to hack into handwired dos assy code without having the source code, and even then, with source code, hardly any of them, so used to C++ or whatever, would have a clue as to what to do. Another thing that makes virii so dangerous is that they work in the background. Plain DOS dont *have a background* for them to run in. Further, what makes sabotage software dangerous is the token ring system, where any saboteur, who can figure out how to mimic the packet format, can infect the whole network. But the BBSes used the star/node system, so even if the hacker could invent something, it always left a digital trail of where it came from. Data packets on the star/node system dont *circulate*, but come from a designated source, to designated destinations along designated routes.
