Just something to write about before we take off for the weekend...
Have you ever gotten a computer virus?
Nope.
We've always been an Apple family, from the very first //e my parents bought in '85 or '86. It's weird to think that back then, Apple dominated the personal computer market and they were doing the equivalent of people who buy a Dell today. But thanks to that - and the fact that Middlebury was a mostly-Mac school and offered discounts to incoming students on new Mac purchases - I've continued along the line to this day. After the //e, my next purchase was the Macintosh Color Classic, sort of a precursor to today's iMacs in that it was an all-in-one computer, with the monitor attached to the CPU and a handle in the top to carry it handily. That lasted me through my college days, though toward the end I had to be careful what I downloaded onto my 40MB (that's forty MEGABYTE) hard drive.
After that, I ended up buying a Centris 650 from a friend who was getting out of the Mac-owning thing and getting a screamingly fast PC. The Centris was the high-end of what we could buy going into Middlebury, so four years later it was well into the obsolescence cycle. But it had a whopping 230MB of hard drive space - more games! More documents! More downloaded pictures of Claudia Schiffer! (Yeah, things were a little lonely in the back woods of Maine.)
The Centris stayed with me for the move to Massachusetts and the subsequent move up to Weird Husband World Headquarters, where we live now. I managed to use my persuasive skills to get Mrs. Dave to use HER interest-free loan to purchase a "wicked fast" Power Mac G4, aka Sawtooth. This thing was a MACHINE. According to the US government, this thing qualified as a supercomputer when it was released in 1999. It's still the machine I use today, though now it probably qualifies more as a reasonablydecentcomputer. It now has a younger sister, the iBook that Mrs. Dave uses.
All of which means, no viruses.
Of course, that doesn't mean that we Mac users didn't cause our share of mischief. Though it wasn't strictly a virus, a friend and I did have a bit of fun with a guy across the hall our freshman year of college. To protect the innocent, let's call him Jon Larson II (Yes, the second. Not Jon Larson Jr., Jon Larson II. You figure it out.) Anyway, Jon was incredibly dense and prone to windbaggery where he'd just corner you and hold forth on any number of topics. He also ALWAYS had his computer on, so unless it crashed, he would never restart it. And he NEVER turned the volume off, so we'd always hear his music or the sound effects from his games. Not to mention that he'd get in the mood to listen to one particular song over and over and over - one day he put Led Zeppelin's "The Battle of Evermore" on infinite repeat...and then left for class, forgetting to turn it off. After that, a friend and I decided we'd get our revenge on Jon. Enter Belch.
Belch was a system extension for Macintosh System 7. It did one thing, and one thing only - make your computer come down with a severe case of indigestion. Basically, it would let out a tremendous belching sound every few minutes, and do so anywhere from one to ten times in a row. It would also paralyze the computer while doing so (a lovely feature of the old system software - when one program was doing its thing, you couldn't do anything in other programs). Now, if Belch had been a regular program, it would have shown up in the program menu and been detected immediately by the user. Not much fun. But Belch was a system extension, which meant that it was not only buried deep within the System folder, but that it wouldn't load on the computer until the next time it was restarted. And remember, Jon never shut his computer down. We took things even one step further - we changed the icon on Belch to an innocuous printer icon, and named it "ImageWriter III" (The ImageWriter II was a popular printer of the time, and you needed to have a printer's extension in your system folder in order to use it). A few days went by, Jon's computer finally crashed, he restarted it...and the burping began. It was all we could do not to piss ourselves laughing. He'd restart the computer, leave it off for a while, but then as soon as he turned it back on, back came the URRRRRRRP URRRRRRRRP URRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRP from his room.
Jon and his computer are long gone by now, but a trip down memory lane reveals that Belch is still around. I guess the classics never die...
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