A virus for the BBC Micro

If you work with British software or hardware engineers, you'll find that there is now an entire generation, perhaps in their 40s and 50s, who stand out slightly from their peers in background and experience. These were lucky teenagers who benefited from the British government's effort in the 1980s to educate young people about computing and who, unlike those who came before or after them, arrived at courses of university engineers fresh out of school, perfectly familiar with all facets of a computer, from the hardware on up. /p>

[Alan Pope] is of that generation, and he tells a story from his youth that wasn't so out of place at the time, about how he wrote what we would today call a simple virus to BBC Micro. . Better yet, he recreated it.

This post is as much a delightful trip back in time through this era of microcomputing, including an entertaining aside while sharing a plane ride with BBC Micro designer Chris Turner, and he serves as a reminder of how the BBC Micro disk operating system works. . There was a !boot file, which would run from disk on startup, and its piece of code would overturn it and hide in the machine's side RAM. The payload was pretty simple, every 32 software restarts it printed a "Hello World" message, but it seems that was enough in 1989 to get it into trouble. The 2023 equivalent works, but we don't think any teachers will come looking for it this time.

If you can't find a real BBC Micro but still want one on hardware, we've already offered you an FPGA version.