Pay a visit to the Museum of Old School Viruses

Head on over the Museum of Malware, hosted by Archive.org, to see some examples of old school viruses.

Ever thought about infecting your computer with a virus on purpose to see what it does? Well, we would reckon not, but something more on the line of infecting someone’s computer on purpose did cross your mind. Whatever the case may be, Archive.org invites you to pay a visit to the museum of old school viruses.

While everyone is now concerned with what we can do in order to increase the level of security on our devices, there are a couple of computer users out there who suffer from nostalgia. And we aren’t talking about games here. We are of course referring to the golden age of computer viruses, back in the 90s.

Back then, the only thing a computer virus could do was disrupt your normal working routine by displaying a funny 8-bit message. Of course, among those funny names and faces, there were some really nasty looking characters like the CIH and the Alcon viruses.

But malware in the 90s mainly referred to insert a few bytes into a normal looking file or to create a fake .com extension to run before the main executable.

As the computer industry moved forward, viruses and other types of malware became more stealthy and dangerous. No more flamboyant messages as their counterparts from the 90s. And who among us who owned a computer back in the 90s can forget the figure of that shady old dude, traversing our monitor whenever the computer encounter the Walker virus?

Here’s another good one: Elvira. What was Elvira? Well, Elvira G.COM is the perfect example of 90’s malware content. Basically, after the virus got into your computer, the screen would all go black. And suddenly, a dancing text would appear from the bottom, reading out:

Black and White Girl

From Paris

You Make me feel alive

ELVIRA!.

The message went on and on, until, out of frustration you would have turned off your computer.

The virus, probably named after the famous 90s character, Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, was very notorious in its time. But now, you can view the funny Star Wars- like message on Archive.org, along with other viruses.

Pay a visit to the museum of old school viruses and enjoy the funny text messages packed in each virus. And don’t worry about any security issues. According to the site’s curators, all the viruses have been stripped of all harmful code. Moreover, each virus can be viewed using either the flash player included or you can download it and enjoy it on your DosBox emulator.

Photo credits:www.wikipedia.org