[Coco] Were there ever any viruses (virii?) for OS-9?

John Guin johnguin at hotmail.com
Wed Jan 14 13:57:18 EST 2004


 Hello all,

I remember reading in the Rainbow about 1990 or so a short discussion about
a virus possibility for the Color Computer.  Marty Goodman pointed out that
a virus for OS-9 was much more likely, but had never been seen.

Does anyone ever remember seeing one?  Maybe not even for the Coco, but for
OS-9 in general?

Sort of off topic:  I remember the "rabbit" program from the Rainbow guide
to OS-9, which kept spawing child processes of itself until the system
crashed with no memory.  One of my friends got kicked out of college in 1982
for the same thing.  He wrote a batch file to copy itself endlessly.  The
Honeywell CP-5 he ran it on was supposed to have a "lock" of some sort to
keep this from happening more than three times.  It sort of worked.  Each
process could only spawn itself three times, but it still shut down the
system after about 20 minutes.

To finish the story, he got caught and had almost talked himself out of
trouble by saying he was just testing the three process limit to verify it
worked.  Unfortunately, he had named his app "destroy" and he got booted out
of Stephen F. Austin State University.

Thanks,
John Guin



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