27. A pox on all your Amigas

You are listening to the Ericade Radio Network. Time for another episode of Amiga Flashback, the show that takes you back to the 80s and 90s. Something wonderful has happened. This podcast is alive and your ears are infected with an episode about computer viruses. We're now back to the days of discs copied on schoolyards and before the internet changed the rules of the game.DJ Daemon here to take you back to the innocent days before ransomware and botnets.

So viruses, it's pretty much what we call all malware that haunts our computers. But back in the day, a virus was a very specific type of malware, which is short for malicious software. It generally copied itself to the boot sectors and executable files on diskettes and later hard disks. This way, they started every time you booted from an infected diskette and slowlybut steadily spread themselves to every diskette you inserted into your Amiga. Those were then copied by your friends and thus the virus spread all over the world before internet was even a thing. Some viruses just spread, others displayed funny messages, but some actually destroyed files and data. Let's look at some of the classic Amiga viruses out there.

Time for the first Amiga virus of today, SCA. Imagine sitting in front of your beloved Amiga and when you insert your workbench floppy, suddenly you're greeted by the following message. Something wonderful has happened, your Amiga is alive! And even better, some of your disks are infected by a virus, another masterpiece of the mega mighty SCA.This is the first virus to hit infamy for the Amiga and was first seen in November of 1987. The message gets its inspiration from the 1986 movie Short Circuit and the line number 5 is alive. The virus just spreads itself and every 15th time it runs it will display this message. SCA is an acronym for Swiss Cracking Association.and therefore the virus is believed to originate from Switzerland. Fortunately, it has no intent of causing harm. Unfortunately, it does anyway. Non-standard bootblocks needed for some games are overwritten as part of installing the virus and renders the game unplayable. A newer diskette formatted with the fast file systems are damaged as well. In this case, recovery is possible.

second virus may actually be the first Amiga virus ever, Bytebandit. According to the Wikipedia, Bytebandit is a boot sector computer virus created for the Commodore Amiga. It first appeared in January 1988 and was created by SCA. Yes, the same swiss army knife of evil that broke your discs with the SCA virus that we just spoke about. Gee, thanks for nothing.It seems to actually try to damage the system by causing data corruption and will also make the system crash. The message on the disk reads, virus by bytebandit in 9.87, number of copies, and then how many times it has written itself to the disk. It predates the SCA virus, but is not well known. Let's leave the Swiss evil geniuses to their own devices and talk about a bond villain of a former dictator.

Third part of the day is the horrible salamisane now made into a virus. The virus help team site, link in the description, notes that the infamous salamisane virus was first seen in the wild in March of 1991 and in Australia many miles away from Iraq. The virus knows how to infect tori's and it's very advanced.It replaced the disk validator in the L directory on the sys volume. This makes it possible for the virus to start whenever the hard drive boots. It will then start to write the text IRAC over the blocks of the hard drive, leading to corruption. The operating system tries to use disk validator to fix this, and that will do no good, because that's actually the CDN virus now.It also damages any floppy disk it can get its little grubby hands on. For all you IT security geeks out there, it actually tries primitive evasion by encrypting itself. Nothing remarkable by today's standard, but not bad for the early 90s. And it was smart enough not to run on newer versions of Amiga OS that it couldn't handle. So if you had kickstart 2.04 or later, you were safe.And yes, it once destroyed the content of my hard drive. I'm still ticked off.

Conclusion here. It ain't really an Amiga thing. A friend of mine laughed at the Amiga and its many viruses. But he was probably very wrong to do so, as the Amiga had less of those than the PC. And due to piracy copying of diskettes, the viruses ran rampant on most systems. Even the C64 had at least one virus written for it.PCs had the largest user base in the mid 90s and thus the largest amount of viruses. And the computer itself had no built-in protections to speak of for Windows, Mac and even the Atari and Amigas. You had to get an antivirus software package to detect and destroy viruses.The Amiga ones were generally very easy to remove as long as you started the system from a clean hard drive with a good antivirus program installed. A retro seller here in Sweden sold me an Amiga 3000 and it came with a kickstart disc. When I inserted it into my Amiga 500 to check it out, the antivirus program Virus C found the Lamer exterminator virus.So it's still good to check the discs if you're into this whole preservation thing.

So, let's talk about blowing up the house. Okay, seriously, no, I mean, can a virus damage the hardware? Well, generally it's thought that it cannot. It's the conventional wisdom that only data and files can be harmed, but there are exceptions to the rule. Writable bioships can be overwritten in order to destroy the computer. This will render the computer inoperableand may require it to be replaced. But there are other hacks that lure the user into destroying their hardware. A common program on the C64 make the diskette drive play tunes. One I found play Daisy Bell, bicycle built for two, by vibrating the disk drives head assembly at a high frequency, generating audible tunes.

yep. It was also, as far as I know, a great way to throw your heads out of alignment. It's not a virus per se, but still, in a way, malicious.

So that's the discussion about antivirus and virus and all that thing. It started early in the 80s. You may actually remember the Elk Cloner. That was not an Amiga virus, but it did exist for the PC. So it seems to be an equally distributed menace to this society. Everything we call malware today.

The Erikade Radio Network, an Amiga flashback. If you have something to say, some suggestions for new subjects or whatever, just send an email to radio at erikade dot net. That's radio at erikade dot net. Or go to our Discord group. You can just use a web browser and go to discord dot io slash t r n. Discord dot io slash t e r n.

Yeah, well, antiviruses and viruses and stuff is something that has interested me a long time. And that's basically because I actually wrote a special report in my school years on my second upper class assignment. So I kind of delved very deeply into this. And this was during the Amiga years. And I remember they had a slogan. There was a company that sold antivirus and that slogan was "Practice safe hex".

In a week from now you will get another Amiga flashback to your web browser, radio station, listener or podcast, whatever. So if you have a suggestion, as I said, you know the email address. However, we have some stuff coming up. We promise you that it will be an episode in the future about interesting gaming villains from the retro past. And we'll also talk about Amiga games you never knew existed. So...State your own Amiga flashback can be found where you find podcasts.

it getting awfully close to closing time. But thank you for listening and this is DJ Demon saying that if you're on the station, stay tuned, more music coming up. And if this is the podcast you're listening to, well, we have about 27 episodes to listen to. just keep tuning in to the radio station and keep listening to the podcast. We give you the best Amiga music and the best memories.

Anyway, thanks for listening and we're leading you into the night with some nice tunes and remember that we're also on YouTube and Twitch if you are interested so to speak and remember that most podcast apps and most radio apps can get us if you want to listen to us in a mobile phone.

So ta ta for now, this is DJI Demon leaving the airwaves, for this time.