"No you Frog idiot. Computer viruses."
"What is a computer virus? A machine can't get sick."
"How wrong you are ol' buddy. You're in for a lesson now. Sit down." Pierre obliged. This was Max's turf.
"Here goes. If I lose you, just holler, ok, Amigo?" Pierre had grown to hate being called Amigo, but he had never asked Max to stop. Besides, now wasn't the appropriate time to enlighten Max as to the ins and outs of nick name niceties. Pierre nodded silent agreement.
"Computers basically use two type of information. One type of information is called data. That's numbers, words, names on a list, a letter, accounting records whatever. The second type are called programs, we tweaks call them executables. Executables are almost alive. The instructions contained in the executables operate on the data. Everything else is a variation on a theme."
"Yeah, so the computer needs a program to make it work. Everyone knows that. What about these?"
"I'm getting there. Hold on. There are several types of executa- bles, some are COM files, SYS and BAT files act like executables and so do some OVR and OVL files. In IBM type computers that's about it. Apples and MACs and others have similar situations, but these programs are for IBM's. Now imagine a program, an executable which is designed to copy itself onto another program."
"Yeah, so. That's how dGraph works. We essentially seam our- selves into the application."
"Exactly, but dGraph is benign. These," he holds up the disk- ette, "these are contaminated. They are viruses. I only looked at a couple of them, disassembly takes a while. Pierre, if only one of these programs were on your computer, 3 years from now, the entire contents of your hard disk would be destroyed in seconds!" Pierre was stunned. It had never occurred to him that a program could be harmful.
"That's 3 years from now? So what? I probably won't have the same programs on my computer then anyway. There's always some- thing new."