It was called the Casino virus. If it infected your machine, it would remove all files from your hard drive and challenge you to a game. "I'm giving you a last chance to restore your precious data," it would say. "Your data depends on a game of Jackpot."
It presented a kind of digital slot machine, and you had just five chances to spin those digital wheels and land on three matching monochrome icons. If you didn't, Casino berated you with shockingly salty language before deleting your data forever. "You asshole," it would bark. "Say bye to your balls..."
This rather naughty piece of software spread through the computer world in the late 1980s before the rise of the mainstream Internet, traveling from machine to machine on floppy disks passed from one human hand to another. If it ever landed on your DOS machine and commandeered your monochrome monitor, you know just how thrilling a virus could be in those days. Nowadays, viruses never play games. They never talk like teenage boys. They never talk at all. They steal your identity without saying a word. "The old viruses were more like supervillains than terrorists," says computer historian Jason Scott.
Sadly, some people never experienced the thrill of a virus like Casino. But now they can. It's one of many classic viruses now available at the Malware Museum, the latest digital time warp from Jason Scott, our pre-Internet archivist-in-chief. "The Casino virus is legendary. I heard about it my teens," Scott says. "Now, I have my hands on it."
In the late '90s, Scott created a public archive of his old online bulletin board messages---all his modem-powered online chatter with other lonely guys before any of them could get on the Internet---and soon, he was inundated by online bulletin board messages from around the globe. Eventually, he had a bona fide bulletin board museum---praise the Lord!---and over the years, this expanded into all sorts of other lost digital goodies, including audio files and ads and GeoCities pages and---thank God!---AOL CD-ROMs. People tend to send him their digital past. And he happily curates it for the edification and enjoyment of generations future.
It's the most human of endeavors. History is important to humans. And this is history. "There was Haight-Ashbury in the '60s, and there were bulletin boards in the '80s," Scott once told us.
There were also viruses in the 80s. And at about 2 in the morning this past Friday, Scott and his Archive Team ventured into in this rich realm for the first time. Much of the Malware Museum comes from the personal archives of Mikko Hypponen, the chief research scientist at venerable anti-virus company F-Secure. At F-Secure, Hypponen has been catching malware since 1991, and he still had many of his earliest finds sitting on five-and-a-quarter-inch floppies. A few days ago, Hypponen sent several to Scott. Scott didn't respond. But on Friday, Hypponen awoke to find them on the Internet. He was quite pleased. "Casino is my favorite too," he says.
They're all viruses that spread via floppy disks, and they all run on DOS, that gloriously non-graphical operating system that Microsoft summarily and heartlessly destroyed in the mid-'90s with its cheap imitation of the Apple Macintosh. Ah, but don't despair. You can still run them, thanks to a DOS emulator built by Scott and his Archive Team.
Sadly, you can't experience the thrill of these viruses actually infecting and crippling your machine. They've been bowdlerized by Hypponen and others. But they're still thrilling. They still talk like teenage boys. They still send Star Wars credit crawls across your screen---in French. They still promote the legalization of marijuana. They still like Froddo Baggins. In trying to convince you that some sort of sentient android network has taken over your machine, they still use atrocious grammar.
The other (small) letdown is that the Malware Museum doesn't include the very first virus, Brain.A, which messed with your hard drive and said something about a dungeon. Hypponen returned that one to the dudes in Pakistan who wrote it way back in 1986. But you can watch his YouTube documentary on this seminal virus. And at the museum, there are plenty of others that can get you all hot and bothered.
You'll yearn for the good ol' days when teenage boys wrote viruses for the purest of reasons. They didn't write them to take your money or steal your secrets. They wrote them to delete your data, to call you an asshole, to play a game. They wrote them because the could.
