📸

dred interested delegates. He said it would ‘give users a chance to work with computer viruses’.

Technically any virus is little more than a self-replicating program with a sting in its tail. This sting, usually known as the ‘payload’, is what the virus actually does to the computer, and that can be nothing at all – apart from replicating – or a harmless joke, like making a ball bounce around the screen or programming the computer to play a tune. At another level, the payload can cause the destruction of data.

Computer viruses are carried from computer to computer by diskettes or, in networked computers, by the wires that link them. They can also be transmitted on telephone lines, through modems, like ordinary computer programs. Viruses do not fly through the air and cannot jump from computer to computer without being carried by a physical medium.

This explanation may seem simple to the point of absurdity, but when viruses first began to garner press inches, and breathless reporters began to write up lurid stories about ‘technological viruses’, their properties were exaggerated into the realms of science fiction. Viruses made a good story – even if there was no basis to the contention that viruses were causing damage to computers.

In 1986, when Burger made his presentation to the Chaos conference, there were almost no viruses in existence. Few people in the computer industry had come into contact with one, despite increasing interest in the subject from security experts, who were touting viruses as the next big threat to computer systems. The simple fact was that Burger’s Virdem was probably the only virus then seen by anyone.

The properties of viruses were known; the damage that could be caused by viruses was known. Even the nightmare scenario had been posited: that a plague of viruses would move swiftly through the computers of the Western technological societies, wiping out data on computers and devastating corporations, government agencies, police forces, financial institutions, the military and, eventually, the structure of the society itself. By 1986, though, actual attacks by viruses on computer systems had yet to happen.

The next year, 1987, Burger’s book about computer viruses, Das

📸