No smartass replies I’m serious I need to know I’m doing a paper.
Edit: Here I am being a shithead trying to come up with the dumbest question possible and people are getting all informative on me.
No smartass replies I’m serious I need to know I’m doing a paper.
Edit: Here I am being a shithead trying to come up with the dumbest question possible and people are getting all informative on me.
Remove one instance of “internet” from the question and you’ll get serious answers.
Do they want serious answers or shitposts? I’m confused.
Should probably change it to “How did computer viruses spread before the internet”
But I don’t know if they actually would have been a thing outside of government type shit.
Would have had to be through direct injection requiring physical access to the machine using methods like breaking and entering, tailgating, insider access, or via social engineering using “dropped” media containing the virus.
This is speculation tho. I’m sure there’s articles on it somewhere.
Well as one of those persons who did development on home computers in the 80s I know exactly how they spread … :) Bootsectors mostly, but there were some that hid themselves in executables too. You copied a disk from a friend, ran it and the virus was then resident in memory until you turned the computer off again. Any new disks you inserted would be at risk of getting infected.
Wild.
Side note that this made me think of, but one of my favorite, uhh viruses?, from the Netscape internet era was cupholder.exe, which when ran popped out your CD drive.
Crazy to think about how people used to just download sketchy .exe files like that or LiNkIng-PaRk-nUmB.exe or similar on Limewire.
Idk… it’s posted in the LemmyShitPost community. I think we’re doomed regardless 💀