The ’80s and ’90s were a different time, especially when it comes to computer viruses. It’s pretty cool to look back now, when we’re safe from being infected by these old-school nefarious programs.
Archive.org has a new collection called ‘The Malware Museum”, and it lets you look through the messages and animations that viruses left on MS-DOS machines. You can view the whole selection here, otherwise, we’ve got some stand-outs below. Some messages were neat. Some, immature. And some were just kind of silly. Have a look. (Epilepsy warning!)
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9 responses to “The Real Malware Messages Hackers Used To Leave On Computers”
The oldie but goodie…
“Your PC is now Stoned!”
“Your PC is now Stoned!”
“Your PC is now Stoned!”
“Your PC is now Stoned!”
“Your PC is now Stoned!”
“Your PC is now Stoned!”
“Your PC is now Stoned!”
“Your PC is now Stoned!”
“Your PC is now Stoned!”
An endless stream of it in DOS til you hit CTRL + C… good times Marijuana virus, good times.
Rip yankee doodle virus 🙁
Anyone cop the Goldfish virus? That was a goodie….
I remember the ping pong virus. A little ball bounced around the screen destroying everything in its path.
…actually, it didn’t do any damage, it just bounced.
I had the kmart virus. It totally killed my 286 and 486. I didn’t know back then about formatting and reinstalling.
Oh. For all the kids out there. Windows 95 ran a lot better if every 6 or 12 months, you formatted and reinstalled it. This was before the days of the internet so drivers etc etc were not a thing. There were no updates. You just had your 3.5″ discs, maybe some cd-roms and that was it.
I miss those days. We had no idea how primitive it was. We thought it was off the hook! I still remember the first time I played Wing Commander 3. Goddamn it was a golden age. **falls asleep in chair**
” Windows 95 ran a lot better if every 6 or 12 months” and later with Win Millenium you had to install the OS every 1-2 months. But for 2 months it did run pretty well 🙂
I really liked Win ME. But damn did I do a lot of formatting back then.
I remember having a 2 virus at once! You got to see a never ending war between them as they fight to regain supreme of your computer!
How did I post twice?