"The LORD is near to all those who call on him, to all who call on him in truth" Psalm 145:18 (Public domain translation)
20 years ago today, the infamous Michelangelo virus was supposed to strike computers far and wide, on Friday March 6, 1992. I did not have a computer at home, since a computer cost between $1500 and $2000 at the time (once in a while, a low-end 386 without a monitor would be seen in Computer Shopper for only $1000), but used the computers at the local computer lab for writing documents with Microsoft Word and writing the occasional small computer program in Qbasic.
I first read about it in the local newspaper and didn't think about it too much. At the time, we were discussing how news was reported in our English class and one of our assignments was to watch the news and report in class what we saw on the news. Every network was giving extensive coverage to the Michelangelo virus.
They did not take chances in the computer lab; on March 6, all of the computers had their date set to be a week in the future to completely avoid any chance of the virus being triggered.
It would be over a year before I finally had internet access, discovered open source, and became interested in computers again. In the above picture, you may see how I looked at the time; I fancied myself a musician.
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