221–227 of 227 posts
I attended the SoCal Vintage Computer festival, went to a talk and when they asked for questions, seeing no one else asking questions, I asked if anyone wrote malware for these systems now that they’re internet connected. The inventor of the device (Thomas Cherryhomes) immediately belittled the question and asked why anyone would want to do that (the irony seemed to escape him, given that he built a network interface…
I attended the SoCal Vintage Computer festival, went to a talk and when they asked for questions, seeing no one else asking questions, I asked if anyone wrote malware for these systems now that they’re internet connected. The inventor of the device (Thomas Cherryhomes) immediately belittled the question and asked why anyone would want to do that (the irony seemed to escape him, given that he built a network interface…
I attended the SoCal Vintage Computer festival, went to a talk and when they asked for questions, seeing no one else asking questions, I asked if anyone wrote malware for these systems now that they’re internet connected. The inventor of the device (Thomas Cherryhomes) immediately belittled the question and asked why anyone would want to do that (the irony seemed to escape him, given that he built a network interface…
It would be possible to write malware for a Spectrum using this device but I don't think anyone ever has - needless to say, a Sinclair Spectrum isn't a secure computing platform. It would certainly be possible to write a worm.
Back when I was a teenager, we had an econet network of BBC Micros/BBC Masters and Acorn Archimedes at our school, and I did indeed try to write a worm for that platform (essentially, attaching itself to a user's !Boot script - essentially adding some 6502 code to the start of it to allow the program to spread itself to other !Boot scripts - the BBC micro allowed you to attach 'hooks' to its system calls, so as long as the user didn't overwrite the memory where your program was or do FX 200,2 followed by Ctrl-Break (a precaution I always took before logging on :-)) you could keep a small program memory resident. Especially in a Master 128.
I gave up because I realised the teacher who ran the computer lab had started taking quite a close interest in the code I was writing, and I wasn't entirely confident that he didn't know 6502 asm (one day I forgot to PROT my system, and I noticed a slow down while running the assembler, the slow down a sure sign someone was using VIEW to view my screen. So I ran PROT, which disabled that, and within 30 seconds the guy was in the room and looking over my shoulder! He knew that I knew, and he knew that I knew that he knew what was going on) Afraid of being caught and banned, I abandoned the project. (For the avoidance of doubt, the 'malware' in question was a bit like the idea of the Morris worm, simply to spread itself but with no payload).
However something similar could be done on other 8 bit systems. The "mal" part of the malware would be extremely limited - with such a small amount of RAM, no multitasking and no memory protection, anything you load into memory isn't going to last long once a user loads a real program.
The real target of any malware would be things like the TNFS (network filesystem) daemon, as to be able to run on vintage hardware it's got to be written in plain C and there could be bugs, and the filesystem protocol being very simple and unencrypted is not secure (nor is it designed to be, the preface on the README for tnfs does tell users they are mad if they try to store any data they want to keep private). The other target I guess in the case of ESP32 based devices is the ESP32 itself, but that's not really malware targeting the vintage system.
I attended the SoCal Vintage Computer festival, went to a talk and when they asked for questions, seeing no one else asking questions, I asked if anyone wrote malware for these systems now that they’re internet connected. The inventor of the device (Thomas Cherryhomes) immediately belittled the question and asked why anyone would want to do that (the irony seemed to escape him, given that he built a network interface…
I attended the SoCal Vintage Computer festival, went to a talk and when they asked for questions, seeing no one else asking questions, I asked if anyone wrote malware for these systems now that they’re internet connected. The inventor of the device (Thomas Cherryhomes) immediately belittled the question and asked why anyone would want to do that (the irony seemed to escape him, given that he built a network interface…
There was this whole period where machines were getting small enough that an individual person might be able to afford a computer, and away from unit record systems that were basically glorified accounting machines that worked with punched cards and paper tape into things such as refreshable text and graphics displays, sound chips, etc.
Why preserve it? Well if you want to know where you are going it helps to know where you've been; and yes, there's a heavy dose of nostalgia there for those of us who grew up with these machines.
Have you never wondered what the GUI and mouse was like BEFORE Windows and Mac? You could actually try it on a Lisa or Xerox Star, an Amiga or Atari ST, or using GEOS on the C64..
I attended the SoCal Vintage Computer festival, went to a talk and when they asked for questions, seeing no one else asking questions, I asked if anyone wrote malware for these systems now that they’re internet connected. The inventor of the device (Thomas Cherryhomes) immediately belittled the question and asked why anyone would want to do that (the irony seemed to escape him, given that he built a network interface…
It is not possible to infect 8-bit computers from the 1970s and early 1980s with malware. The operating system is on a dedicated chip that would have to be physically replaced with a new chip that contains the crippled OS. This is in stark contrast to more modern computers where the OS can be modified by software (e.g. malware).