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20 Years of Computer Viruses
Tuxedo Jack writes "The Register reports that twenty years ago today (19 January 1986), the first computer virus, Brain, was discovered. By modern standards, this was a minor virus, and it spread by floppy disks, which is a far cry from the network-aware worms of today. Still, though, it was the first noted virus, and we've had twenty years of pain and annoyance from it and its successors. Happy birthday, Brain, you and all your little virus friends - just know we're doing our damndest to keep you from having more."
Thanks to the Blaster virus, I'm getting married in 2 days. See, viruses aren't all bad.
Feed the need: Digitaladdiction.net
Not the first virus. It's the first PC virus, meaning IBM PC running DOS.
...Did it run on linux..?
20 years and 1 day.
Welcome to the Dungeon :430791,443248,280530.
(c) 1986 Basit & Amjad (pvt) Ltd.
BRAIN COMPUTER SERVICES
730 NIZAB BLOCK ALLAMA IQBAL TOWN
LAHORE-PAKISTAN
PHONE
Beware of this VIRUS....
Contact us for vaccination.
I wonder if anyone ever tried to look up these guys. Kind of blatent calling card if you ask me.
30% Troll, 50% Underrated, 10% Interesting
Score:5, Troll
....virus free.
Requiring the user to execute an email attachment is to spreading invisibly via floppy disk
as
a) Slashdot is to news
b) Bush is to Clinton
c) Moth is to butterfly
d) Suicide is to STD
And, "The first PC virus was a boot sector virus called (c)Brain, created in 1986 by two brothers, Basit and Amjad Farooq Alvi, operating out of Lahore, Pakistan. The brothers reportedly created the virus to deter pirated copies of software they had written."
I LOVE YOU
... how Quantum Viruses would be.
I love humanity, it is people I hate
Time to whip out the old 5 1/4" floppies!!!!!!
"Happy birthday, Brain, you and all your little virus friends - just know we're doing our damndest to keep you from having more."
Good luck. You'll need it, 'cause selection pressure tends to win.
it has to be said, wouldnt the first virus be when microsoft came out with its first operating system
... it spread by floppy disks, which is a far cry from the network-aware worms of today.
While a network virus could reach around the globe in a matter of seconds, floppy disk viruses were just as bad before networks and CDs became common. Not only did you have to scan your own hard drive, but each and every floppy disk if you didn't know where the virus came from. You often had to practice "safe computing" by asking if the floppy disk was scanned before you use it on your own machine.
For 20 years of occasionally losing sleep and mucho work time to dealing with the various virii that have popped up on your shoddily-secured operating system. I'm certain we're in for at least 20 more years while we await your demise. It'll be slow in coming but sure.
If you are getting married because of a viral outbreak, then it's simplest to just think of yourself as a virtual-wartime profiteer.
20 years ago: Beware of this VIRUS
20 days ago: lol this is not a virus
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
create a crisis and provide means of solving the crisis for a nice fee.
:430791,443248,280530.
Welcome to the Dungeon
(c) 1986 Basit & Amjad (pvt) Ltd.
BRAIN COMPUTER SERVICES
730 NIZAB BLOCK ALLAMA IQBAL TOWN
LAHORE-PAKISTAN
PHONE
Beware of this VIRUS....
Contact us for vaccination............ $#@%$@!!
can we be sure the same thing isn't happening today at say... symantec?
You can't handle the truth.
Windows is also 20 years old, give or take a couple of months.
:)
Laugh, it's a joke. Windows wasn't even natively network aware until 10 years later
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
"No, I'm Brian, and so's my wife!"
Get your own free personal location tracker
When one media pundit was being subjected to derision because of his outlandish idea that viruses might be spread by email.
Coincidently, it was twenty years ago today that my first sexually transmiteed virus, Herpes, was discovered. Compared to today's potential bird flu, its a minor virus, and like Brain, it spread by my "floppy disk" (as I like to call it). Still, though, it was my first noted virus, and I've had twenty years of pain and annoyance from it and its many successors. Happy birthday, Herpes, you and all your little virus friends - just know I'm doing my damndest to keep myself from having more.
there are only OS viruses. this is an important distinction in modern times when the term "computer virus" is used when 99.999999*% of the time the correct term would be "Microsoft Windows virus". more generally it promotes a misunderstanding to the public that viruses are a feature of computers themselves rather than particular computer configurations.
*recurring decimals not shown
The only thing outlandish is calling programs that require the user to explicitly execute "viruses". Virus that exploits the email preview pane to execute without user knowledge? Sure, virus. Virus that makes remote calls to a vulnerability in an Outlook COM object? Sure, virus. Virus that relies on a user to click OmG_R34LNuD3P1c5_Br17n3y5p33rS.jpg.exe? No, not a virus.
It uses to be that "worm" != "virus". Now days, it seems, many people call just about everything a "virus", when in fact, the "more proper definition" would be worm. Or, maybe I'm just being an old fart about this. It's pretty simple. If it is a _standalone_ program meant to infect machines, then it would be considered a "worm". If the malicous program where to "infect" other programs (say - via .exe, .com infector or MBR), it's a "virus".
That is, a "virus" will actually "attach" itself to a existing program (old com/exe infectors for eaxmple) or load themselves into the MBR/boot records. Then again, I see very obvious "trojans" get called "viruses!!!" all the time as well. Oh well :)
Main reason being there's no real need. There's enough assholes out there betweek immature assholes looking to cause trouble and greedy assholes looking to use systems for spam and such that there's just no lack of viruses.
Remember that if they were doing such a thing they'd face extreme criminal charges when caught, and make no mistake, they would be caught. There's a lot of anti-virus companies out there, and a lot of security researchers. Sooner or later, I'd be diacovered they were the source and then they'd be fucked.
You don't take risks like that if there's no reason. Ten viruses per year being released would be plenty to ensure your continued existance, since it only takes one nasty one to remind people your software is valuable. Given the thousands that are released, there's no reason to put yourself at risk making more.
I never encountered Brain (the virus, dammit!). The first (and only!) virus I've had infecting one of my computers was the Ripper virus. Damned annoying, especially being unaware of it for probably a year or more, and this during the time of zipping files across multiple (I think our record was 17 or so) floppy disks. At least one disk out of a set would always be "dead". Made it really annoying to share doom^h^h^h^h ultima7^h^h^h^h^h^h^h data with friends. Ah, the good ol' days. I did finally get rid of it, but I also dumped all my floppies - too much hassle to check each one of them.
Wasn't Microsoft responsible for PC-DOS? Oh how little has changed!
The same thing we do every night, Pinky, try to infect the world!
If you smoke after sex, you're doing it too fast.
- Dewdney, A. K.; Computer Recreations - In the game called Core
War hostile programs engage in a battle of bits; Scientific American; Mar 1984.
- Dewdney, A. K.; Computer Recreations - A Core War bestiary of
viruses, worms and other threats to computer memories; Scientific
American; Mar 1985.
I've always believed that were it not for these Scientific American articles, it would have taken a lot longer for viruses to become prevalent. These articles piqued the interest of computer users (then synonymous with programmers) everywhere. For example, here's a 1994 comp.sys.apple2 post I just found of someone who was seduced by the articles into writing viruses.Viruses. How annoying they may be, they still grow older than me.
i remember on my first computer we got the STONED virus from a floppy disk from my dad's work, anyone else get that ???
http://www.vanillaafro.com - take me seriously and I will shoot you
Disinfectant was a nice peice of software...fast, free, small memory footprint, small size... Of course, it was probably pretty easy to keep up to date since it only had 40 or so viruses to keep track of...
Personally, I'm looking forward to the OS X version of Disinfectant... That is, assuming we eventually get to the point where we actually need it. ;p
I guess I am also too smug...
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
wake me up when it arrives...
I've owned machines running DOS 5.0, Windows 3.0, 3.1, OS/2 2.1, OS/2 2.11, Windows 2k Server, Windows XP, Solaris 2.4, Solaris 2.5, Solaris 2.5.1, Solaris 2.6, IRIX 6.2, IRIX 6.5, NeXTSTEP 2.x, NeXTStep 3.3, OpenStep 4.2, OpenBSD 2.{5,6,7,8}, Linux TAMU, Slackware 1.0 (and a bunch of subsequent versions).
Do you know what?
I have never had a virus of any kind on any of those machines.
The best anti-virus protection is inbetween your ears.
Ironically, my IRIX machine was remote rooted, and i had a DOS successfully launched against my Solaris 2.6 machine (sunkill.. made telmod eat cpu/ram in kernel time).
My windows machines have comparatively been trouble free.
What the hell do you people do where your machines are always screwed up with malware on them? Do you not even bother to think about the consequences of your actions?
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
You will soon be the first ./ user to 'do the worm' twice in one year.
Read Pynchon.
There were NO virii for MacOS 6/7/8/9. There were no Mac A/V products for those platforms.
I wouldn't be surprised if MacOS had a disproportionately large # of virii written for it, compared to its market share. And they were always nasty to get rid of, IME.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
Where will all the human viruses go when their host OS becomes obsolete?
My momma gave birth to a winner, I gotta win.
How "computer viruses" have broken countless systems, racked up unbelievable maintenance costs, and scared everybody into not trusting their machines, yet the easiest method of receiving one is praised and used by most end-users.
They are not "computer viruses", they are "windows diseases".
If you'd quit glorifying things such as this, they may...MAY...go away. Quit being geeks ("OH! Look at how they did this! They put this here, and coded this that way, and....NEAT!") and be human beings for once ("Oh. Neat coding, but these folks should be jailed. Morons...")
Macro Viruses, e-mails, Melissa, Blaster... what do they have in common, kids?
"Microsoft products!"
Well done, kids! You get an extra point today!
That was what Microsoft called the first Word macro virus.
There were Apple ][ Viruses (Viri?) out before that.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elk_Cloner/ e.g.
Happy birthday to you, happy birthday dear viruses...
Virii, and assorted critters, have been around for millions (or mexillions/bazillions) of years on this planet. Yet life marches on.
;-)
Computer viruses are different, in that they are created on, and propogated through, devices used only by humans, for the past 20+ years.
Who do you think will win in the long run -- Si or DNA?
Sig - Post when drunk, to avoid further discussion
I'm upgrading my personal mailserver from RedHat 7.2 (now no longer supported by Progeny, alas) tonight to CentOS 4.2. For about 1/2 hour, my new mail server's antivirus wasn't set up, even though email service was on.
I was SHOCKED at how many viruses came in - like 40, more than 1 per minute! That means that this mail server was getting some 1,500 crap emails for me every day.
Unbelievable...
I've just gotten used to never seeing viruses in my email - it's an incredible crapflood of this stuff out there.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
My first virus came off a "commercial" 5.25" floppy that I paided for. (go figure!) This was back in the late 1980's or early 1990's I believe. Sucked big time. ;)
Dana
Life was hell, then I discovered Linux...
Pushing back the release date, of course. ;)
I read the first article about the theoretical possibility of a PC virus in either 1984 or '85, at this time most people scoffed at it, simply refusing to believe it was possible.
.com/.exe etc) and saved this to a text file on a bootable floppy, which was then marked read-only.
:-(
Anyway, having written quite a bit of asm code, I had no problems accepting the possibility, so for fun I decided to write a sort of vaccine:
Simply a small program that took a digitial signature of every executable piece of code (boot blocks,
Afterwards I could simply put in this floppy and reboot, whereupon the same program would compare the current signatures with those saved on the floppy.
The problem was to keep the original list updated each time I wrote a new program.
Terje
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"
...that's also when Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play.
... why don't you just imagine a beowulf cluster of them while you're at it?
Play Command HQ online
This is the first computer virus. From 1975. With source code.
... when some of the virus were funny, like this one that was playing the "Hitchcock Presents" theme once in a while. Or that other one that was beeping each time the Enter key was pressed. This was a time where a TSR was not some obnoxious prick trying to sell you phony mortgage plans.
Nowadays the virus are mostly mail-related, so you get annoyed by other people's virus all the time. Sad.
lucm, indeed.
And theres me thinking the SCA bootblock virus from the SCA in 87 was a trendsetter, but obviously beaten by the apple II stuff. It certainly was a nice piece of code for 4k, funky scrolling text on a red bar set on a black background with the words "Something wonderful has happened" fading up and the usual bootloader. I remember the first time seeing this and someone explaining to me how it replicated, and thinking it was a wind up. Then realizing it was not. The fact they stuffed this into 4k was at the time something of a eye opener and I think help spark the 4k demo scene on the amiga (that and that is the size of the bootsector on a amiga floppy)
The only real problem with it was commercial games used the 4k bootsector on the floppy to bootstrap their copy protected loaders in, and it used to overwrite these.
We managed to keep the spread down to a minimum by use of a cunning device known as a "write protect tab". That is once we had virus checked a disk, it was write protected and that was that, since joe average could not afford a hard disk back then and the amiga ran out of its roms anything memory resident just went when the power was pulled...
NARF!!
Microsoft-free since March 28, 2004
ClamXav? Worth a look, but http://www.oreillynet.com/cs/user/view/cs_msg/7191 6 not protecting Classic. More info here http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/ 24449 and don't forget to update the http://www.markallan.co.uk/clamXav/clamavEngineIns taller_0.88.zip engine. Disinfectant saved a lot of computers! (having worked as a tech, and being paid to clean out infected macs :-))
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
Adding more dangerous features to VBscript, Internet Explorer, and MS Office, of course!
Microsoft-free since March 28, 2004
.. is one of the most memorable occurances in virus history. An author wrote a book on viruses - the title of which shall remain nameless - and helpfully included the source code to an actual virus. Which led to dozens of variants appearing virtually overnight. Not the smartest thing to do.
it spread by floppy disks, which is a far cry from the network-aware worms of today.
"The first implementation of a worm was by two researchers at Xerox PARC in 1978. The authors, John Shoch and Jon Hupp, originally designed the worm to find idle processors on the network and assign them tasks, sharing the processing and so improving the whole network efficiency."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_worm
Not only was it a "network aware" worm, but also a rootkit and a crude "grid" implementation.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
Really? You and all your friends and family are running something other than MS Windows then I take it? ;-)
Yes, I know viruses are technically able to happen in any environment, but practically speaking, how many non-MS-specific viruses (not worms) are currently in the wild for non-MS platforms?
You must write questions for the GRE.
I wouldn't have love at all.
This virus taught me that no warning will stop humans from investigating urequited love notes from their office coworkers.
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Well, that is to say, everything but leave the fragile and intentionally weak operating system, that is. After all, we gotta play games, and we don't like changes, unless they come from Microsoft. :)
"Doing our damnedest"; that's very, very funny. Remember that MS is closed-source, and therefore better code: no one can see the code. So how is it the Vista-ready viruses are ready to go when the OS hasn't been released?
Quit fooling yourself. If you're still running Microsoft, it's out of laziness.
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
For 40 years IBM made computers that were pretty robust. The o/s memory and files were in a privileged part of the machine and out of the reach of ANY user. Why can't we do this with pc's?
And many more of the little bastards
...which came out of Pakistan. :)
For better or for worse, the Pakistanis did start something
Yakee Doodle
See real bug at: http://history.navy.mil/photos/images/h96000/h965
It happened 9 September 1945 at Harvard University.
My Sig indicates the end of the comment I posted.
Of course we can. You just have to let the industry install this nice tamper-proof chip into your computer, disallowing low-level access from all software that is not expressly approved by Microsoft, RIAA or MPAA. You just have to give up your own access to low-level software, because that is not be allowed by any of the aforementioned authorities. You don't have anything against all this, right? Right?
Ok. THIS IS IT!
/ v/virus.html
THE PLURAL OF VIRUS IS _NOT_ VIRI OR VIRII! Its viruses.
For to many years I have been pestered and laughed at on forums and IRC for calling it viruses.
But once and for all, one virus, several viruses. NOT virii.
Take a look here: http://dictionary.reference.com/help/faq/language
And to think that english isnt even my native language.
When in danger, whewn in doubt! Run in circles, scream and shout!
That's right. TSR - Tactical Studies Rules, the folks who created Dungeons and Dragons. :-)
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
Actually, he did, but it didn't have the proper TPS report cover on it.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Making me nostaligic, I thought they'd been eradicated sometime in the 90s. Not had one this century. How can we triumph in eradicating smallpox and now the WHO so close to elimating polio? Oh because ppl aren't as dumb as computer users.
Where are all of the really dangerous viruses? It seems that all of the ones I've heard about recently didn't do a whole lot of damage, versus what they could have done.
It shouldn't be too difficult to develop an autopatcher virus; this would auto-propagate throughout a network and maintain a distributed vulnerability database that could be updated in real-time. The idea would be to automatically exploit and patch machines in a network as new vulnerabilities are discovered. Of course, the payload wouldn't necessarily be restricted to patching vulnerabilities. Once this sort of system was deployed, I can foresee it eventually reaching a critical mass where it simply could not be removed from the network.
That's no way to talk about me on my birthday! I'm not a PC virus!! ohh... wait, I guess I should rtfa, it was 20 years ago, I'm a little older than that.... *hobbles off with cane*
rm -rf
The first "virus" I heard about was mid-80s when a virus got into the Dallas EDS office and infected a bunch of Macs. This was when a Mac was a tall beige box with a 9" screen at the top and a floppy disk slot below it. As I remember, someone got arrested for that. I heard about it from some guys I knew who got paid to go in and remove it.
The first "virus" I remember getting was STONED. I'm guessing early 90's time frame. It came in on a customer machine that was being upgraded. Infected most of the floppy disks in the repair center and then started spreading through the building. It was easy to remove but you had to do it on each and every one of the hundreds of floppy disks in the building. What a pain.
That's my story and I'm sticking to it.
>THE PLURAL OF VIRUS IS _NOT_ VIRI OR VIRII! Its viruses.
THE CONTRACTED FORM OF "IT IS" IS _NOT_ ITS!
It is = it's. You should learn this before correcting others with dictionary definitions.
Nowadays Brain is extinct.
Yes, but it's trying to reinvent itself for THE comeback of a lifetime!
Coderz 4 Life
how can this response (that I'm replying to) be flagged troll?...that doesnt make a bit of sense to me.
Apparently this "virus" was originally intended to sit on people's PCs and ensure that they didn't run certain copyrighted software without a license. It explains the apparently silly idea of placing the authors contact information into the virus message along with a request for contact.
Although this is a rather bad idea for copy-protection enforcement I've seen similar schemes (INT13 hooks minus the virus transmission part) in CAD/CAM and music software. What's interesting is that it casts a completely different light on the intentions of the authors (misguided vs. malicious) that isn't reported in TFA.
I can't find any specifics about what the original software that was being protected was used for. Why was it so widespread? Did we (the USA) really screw Pakistani developers out of income for a useful utility? Or is this a case of a bad copy-protection scheme getting out of hand and falsely reporting violations?
What are we going to do today Brain?
The same thing we try to do every night Pinky...try to take over the world!
i was merely trying to illuminate the lack of historical perspective in your post. As other posters have mentioned - early viruses _were_ OS agnostic. Later on, platforms without proper user segmentation/memory protection (like Dos, Win 3.x, and Mac OS pre-X) all had viruses written for them.
As an aside, viruses do tend to be platform specific now, and "platform" means more than operating system. For instance, viruses that spread from one website to another via hijacking a browser. The browser is vulnerable, but the virus targets servers _and_ browsers.
Or the outlook/word macro viruses. These are application-specific viruses. You can use windows but be totally immune to these viruses if you dont have/use those particular applications.
The idea that there is a correlation between product security and # of viruses developed and in circulation, and that that is the only correlation, is false.
We can see that, observationally, the security of something like SunOS 4 or IRIX 4 was very very poor, yet there were few/any? viruses for those platforms.
Additionally, viruses as a type of attack are less interesting than they used to be. What makes a virus a virus is its self replicating nature. Why does it self replicate? So it is more likely to be run again and again. It needs to insert itself into as many programs as possible because invoking those programs/execution containers (in the case of word macro viruses) is how it delivers its payload and continues to spread. That is no longer the case today - platforms are always on, with long running service type processes. Malware can create new processes on the fly without user intervention. The "infect as many files as possible to increase liklihood of execution" is not really a relevant attack paradigm in a modern, always connected operating system.
In any case, there is nothing about OS X or any UNIX for that matter that makes it fundamentally more virus-resistant than Windows NT based systems. In each platform, the user is still required to do something for a virus to work. In the case of Windows, there are lots more ways that code can be executed, and the penetratino of these mechanisms is higher, but the former is a features issue and the latter is a market penetation issue.
If 90% of the population were using Mac OS X, we'd see more Mac OS X malware (2nd issue). 90% of the population wont ever use Mac OS X, because it lacks the features people want (the first issue - we don't build execution engines into various contexts just to make malware easier to develop. There are legitimate reasons why users would want Macros in Excel or HTML in their email. The problem is balancing flexibility of features with security in the face of increasing hostility)
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
If I remember correctly, the first viruses were created by Dr. Fred Cohen (and on UNIX systems, by the way, back in the day when sys admins were trusting) back in the early '80's. He coined the term "virus" back in 1983 (or actually his research advisor did). He published his first paper in 1984.
Apparently this 20-year "anniversary" is for the first virus found "in the wild". Fair enough, but it is not the 20-year anniversary of the first computer virus.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
I would guess that if that is what you want, then that is the computer you should buy.
It would also be worth saying that if you think there is a money making market in that product then you should start a company selling it and get rich yourself.
Only problem is then we couldn't complain about other people getting rich selling us things we don't want.
A quick google gives some funny reading ...
http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:pebp5iyrBeIJ:li nuxmafia.com/~rick/eblug-lecture-2004-12-15.sxi
Quote follows:
Back in the mid-1970s, several of the system support staff at Motorola discovered a relatively simple way to crack system security on the Xerox CP-V timesharing system. Through a simple programming strategy, it was possible for a user program to trick the system into running a portion of the program in `master mode' (supervisor state), in which memory protection does not apply. The program could then poke a large value into its `privilege level' byte (normally write-protected) and could then proceed to bypass all levels of security within the file-management system, patch the system monitor, and do numerous other interesting things. In short, the barn door was wide open. Motorola quite properly reported this problem to Xerox via an official `level 1 SIDR' (a bug report with an intended urgency of `needs to be fixed yesterday'). Because the text of each SIDR was entered into a database that could be viewed by quite a number of people, Motorola followed the approved procedure: they simply reported the problem as `Security SIDR', and attached all of the necessary documentation, ways-to-reproduce, etc. The CP-V people at Xerox sat on their thumbs; they either didn't realize the severity of the problem, or didn't assign the necessary operating-system-staff resources to develop and distribute an official patch. Months passed. The Motorola guys pestered their Xerox field-support rep, to no avail. Finally they decided to take direct action, to demonstrate to Xerox management just how easily the system could be cracked and just how thoroughly the security safeguards could be subverted. They dug around in the operating-system listings and devised a thoroughly devilish set of patches. These patches were then incorporated into a pair of programs called `Robin Hood' and `Friar Tuck'. Robin Hood and Friar Tuck were designed to run as `ghost jobs' (daemons, in UNIX terminology); they would use the existing loophole to subvert system security, install the necessary patches, and then keep an eye on one another's statuses in order to keep the system operator (in effect, the superuser) from aborting them. One fine day, the system operator on the main CP-V software development system in El Segundo was surprised by a number of unusual phenomena. These included the following: * Tape drives would rewind and dismount their tapes in the middle of a job. * Disk drives would seek back and forth so rapidly that they would attempt to walk across the floor (see walking drives ). * The card-punch output device would occasionally start up of itself and punch a lace card. These would usually jam in the punch. * The console would print snide and insulting messages from Robin Hood to Friar Tuck, or vice versa. * The Xerox card reader had two output stackers; it could be instructed to stack into A, stack into B, or stack into A (unless a card was unreadable, in which case the bad card was placed into stacker B). One of the patches installed by the ghosts added some code to the card-reader driver... after reading a card, it would flip over to the opposite stacker. As a result, card decks would divide themselves in half when they were read, leaving the operator to recollate them manually. Naturally, the operator called in the operating-system developers. They found the bandit ghost jobs running, and X'ed them... and were once again surprised. When Robin Hood was X'ed, the following sequence of events took place: !X id1 id1: Friar Tuck... I am under attack! Pray save me! id1: Off (aborted) id2: Fear not, friend Robin! I shall rout the Sheriff of Nottingham's men! id1: Thank you, my good fellow! Each ghost-job would detect the fact that the other had been killed, and would start a new copy of the recently slain program within a few millisecond