[Coco] Were there ever any viruses (virii?) for OS-9?

[Allen Huffman]

> I remember reading in the Rainbow about 1990 or so a short discussion 
> about
> a virus possibility for the Color Computer.  Marty Goodman pointed out 
> that
> a virus for OS-9 was much more likely, but had never been seen.
>
> Does anyone ever remember seeing one?  Maybe not even for the Coco, 
> but for
> OS-9 in general?

There was a CoCo Disk Basic virus written by Steve Bjork.  It would 
"install" just by you typing in "DIR", then it would write out to any 
other disk put on the system.  The "DIR to run" trick was used by 
various game companies to load software, too.

After the mention in Rainbow, apparently it was deemed a bad idea since 
someone could take the code and make it into a bad virus, so it was 
never released.

As to OS-9, I've never heard of one.  OS-9 modules have a CRC check to 
them so one could validate that the module was what you expected very 
easily.

		Allen