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centre for Comecon (Eastern Europe's Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, now defunct), trading its computers for cheap raw materials from the Soviet Union and basic imports from the other Socialist countries. Bulgaria had the potential, in that it had many well-educated young electronics engineers; what it didn't have, with its archaic infrastructure and ill-managed economy, was any particularly useful application for its own hardware.

With the resources of the state behind Bulgaria's computerization, the country began manufacturing copies of IBM and Apple models. The machines were slow – very slow by today's standards – and were already obsolete even when they first started crawling off the production line. They had been 'designed' at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, but without the help or blessing of either IBM or Apple. The Bulgarian machines were simply poorly manufactured clones that used the same operating systems and computer language as the real IBMs and Apples.

In the latter half of the 1980s, shiny new computers started to appear in state organizations, schools, colleges and computer clubs. Many were destined to sit on the boss's desk, largely unused, symbols of a high-tech society that never really existed. Few businesses had any real need for computers; some used them simply to store personnel records. It was a gloss of technology laid over a system that, at its core, wasn't functioning.

In addition, Bulgaria didn't have any software. While the factories continued to manufacture PCs, the most basic requirement – programs to make the machines function – had to be pirated. So the Bulgarians began copying Western programs, cracking any copy protection schemes that stood in their way, and became more and more skilled at hacking – in the classic sense of the word. They could program their way around any problem; they learned the ins and outs of the IBM and Apple operating systems; they became skilled computer technicians as they struggled to keep their unreliable and poorly manufactured computers functioning. In short, they were assimilating all the skills they would need to become first-class virus writers.

The first Bulgarian viruses to arrive in the West were seen in 1989. They became increasingly sophisticated and malignant, progressing

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