so, I'm reading the wall street journal this morning and the main story in the marketplace section begins like this
"Users of Apple Computer Inc.'s Macintosh computers have long enjoyed the technology equivalent of a safe neighborhood, where the viruses and security nuisances that bedevil far more common Windows PCs are practically nonexistent."
not being a current mac (or windows) user, I found this statement kinda funny - does nobody but me remember the early days of mac proliferation in academia where viruses were
everywhere? for me, it was late high school and all through college, and disk after disk was hit with one virus or another, and one paper after another lost and needed to be rewritten, so eventually you needed to make space for one anti-virus program after another to combat it all (and remember, you needed to carry around your own boot and software disks, since only one mac in the lab had a hard drive, but the little ambulance icons were cute), and disks were $5.00 and that was a lot of money to a college student...
anyway, for the sake of mac users everywhere, I'm glad to hear that
recent mac users haven't been plagued with these problems. or maybe college was a lot longer ago than it feels...
Mac OS X
shiflett on 2006-02-27T14:05:20
Macs used to not be BSD.
:-)
Re:Mac OS X
geoff on 2006-02-27T14:20:01
yeah :) and from this it seems that the switch to OS X was farther back than I remember. oh, how time flies...
Those were the days
ziggy on 2006-02-27T15:08:07
Yeah, I remember those days. (My first Mac had two floppy drives and ran System 6.0.2)
The virus problem was so pervasive that a housemate of mine pitched a term paper on the problems of computer viruses all the way back in 1988. Those were the days of
nVIR and similar ilk, which were mostly concerned with simple replication.
:-)
