Shellshock

Posted on September 25, 2014 by Tim Hall

Who remembers the day when computer viruses were spread in the boot sector of floppy disks?

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5 Responses to Shellshock

  1. Claudiu Draghia says:
    October 1, 2014 at 8:54 am

    NICE ONE !!! but who remembers that floppy disks were either 8, 5 or 3.5 inch ? :)

  2. Tim Hall says:
    October 1, 2014 at 8:59 am

    I remember 8″ floppies. My first job used those; using SORD hardware and an early 4GL called “PIPS3″.

    I also remember the time when the highest bandwidth transatlantic data transfer was to fly on Concorde with a bag of magnetic tapes.

  3. John P. says:
    October 1, 2014 at 9:06 pm

    I’ve still got an 8″ floppy disk in the back of the cupboard. It was for the DEC PDP/8 I first learnt programming on at school and had a time sharing OS on it so that you could have someone on the console and then another person using the keyboard on the line printer next to it. Meanwhile, someone else could prep a program on punch tape using the teletype. The only virus involved there was the bogey you flicked at your mate …

  4. Tim Hall says:
    October 1, 2014 at 9:17 pm

    Paper tapes. Now you’re making me feel really old…

  5. Kevin Prince says:
    October 2, 2014 at 10:16 am

    Punched tape – loved it. Sending murray code ry as a test signal on the old T100. Even had a tuning fork to get the mechanical bits whirring at the right frequency to transmit at 50 Baud. Even better the output was 80-0-80v so you could hook it up to the metal framed operators chair, step back and watch the fun!

    After that used 8″ floppy disks to back up Plessey 256K bubble memory units – when the 256th K was saved the next save just pushed the oldest stuff off the stack and it was gone forever.

    Happy days, and they were indeed. Mind you, less said about my morse the better.

    Kev