150 WORD ARTICLE

My First Computer Virus [CVIII]

Or… Technology and the stupid things that engineers will do out of curiosity

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You are going to have to think back to a different time

The ubiquitous floppy disk — most people only know it from the ‘save’ icon that still exists today:

There was a file named autoexec.bat that if placed on the root file system would automatically be executed as a batch process.

It was a nice feature for games and applications that could be used by developers and software houses to automatically load an application.

This saved time for the user having to root around the contents of the floppy disk and figure out which application should be run.

In any case — I decided to play a prank on a friend of mine — what this autoexec.bat file would do is to create 10 directories with a random name then go through the ten directories and create another 10 directories and so on.

So you would get to a point where there were 10, then 100, then 1,000, then 10,000 directories on the file system — annoying, but not fatal — or so I thought.