Tag Archives: 1980s

The SCA virus is the first computer virus created for the Commodore Amiga and one of the first to gain public notoriety. It appeared in November 1987. The SCA virus is a boot sector virus. It features a line of text that appears at every 15th copy after a warm reboot:

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 !!

Cascade (1987) is an early virus with the interesting payload of causing characters to fall to the bottom of the screen.

Elk Cloner (1982) was written by a 15 year old high school student called Rich Skrenta as a practical joke. The virus was developed for the Apple II system and was a boot sector virus that spread via floppy discs (mostly through pirated games).

CyberAIDS, a virus for Apple II from 1988. Extortion ware is nowadays more known as ransom ware.

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The Brain virus is considered the first PC virus. Created by Basit Farooq Alvi in 1986.

The Ping-Pong virus (also called Boot, Bouncing Ball, Bouncing Dot, Italian, Italian-A or VeraCruz) is a boot sector virus discovered on March 1, 1988 at the University of Turin in Italy. The virus would become active if a disk access is made exactly on the half hour and start to show a small “ball” bouncing around the screen in both text mode (the ASCII bullet character “•”) and graphical mode.

Lamer Exterminator (1989) virus for Commodore Amiga.

The SCA Virus was probably the first Amiga virus (1987). It became extremely common, and later SCA released a software to remove the virus.

There were many clones of the virus with cool names like 666, AIDS, Bad Bytes 4, Big Boss, Deniz Cool, Disk-Terminator, KarlMarx, LSD, MAX and NASA.

BHP (1986) is one of a few Commodore 64 viruses. It is also the first full-stealth file-infecting virus a distinction often wrongly attributed to the DOS Frodo virus.

Poster by Boris Bućan for the opera Nikola Šubić Zrinski (1983).