In 1990 I had a number of short-term jobs. One of them was, again, work with a federal government department, this time with the department of Fisheries and Oceans. I did a bunch of different types of work for them installing and testing various types of communications equipment, as well as reviewing software. I also helped out in a variety of different ways.
The office was fairly large, and did have its own IT staff. These people found it amusing that I was studying computer viruses. They felt that this was an unnecessary field of endeavor, since computer viruses were, at best, a minor problem, related only to MD-DOS machines (I know that Windows 1 was out, but it had very little market penetration), and they, themselves, the gods of the IT department in this particular locale, used OS/2 on their own computers, and so were at no risk. Or that's what they thought.
One of them one day approached my desk in a rather furtive manner. He asked me to come with him but when I asked what it was for he looked around and wouldn't tell him me and just asked me to come. We went back to the IT room, and one of the fellows, with an OS/2 computer, said that he thought his computer might be infected. I was a little bit surprised at this, because of their use of the OS/2 operating system. (I'm not certain that OS/2 *never* had a virus written for it, but it would be unlikely.) But when I pushed for a bit more detail on the story, I realized that it was not only possible, but had in fact happened.
In those far off days, there were only two major types of computer viruses that would be encountered on business machines. The one type was the file infector, which would have infected executable files. These had to operate within the bounds of the operating system, and therefore, yes, it would have been improbable for an OS/2 machine to get infected with an MS-DOS virus.
But the other type of virus was the boot sector in factor, or BSI. A BSI actually operated, and infected, the computer before the operating system got to load. It was a very short virus, and simply replaced the loader, that was normally used to tell the computer where to find the operating system. Therefore it was installed before the operating system was installed, and used basic machine functions, rather than relying on system calls to the operating system itself. It was, in fact, a BSI that I had infected this person's machine. And it didn't matter that OS/2 was installed on his computer: the BSI got in before the operating system loaded.
I *did* manage to clean up his computer.
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