> Early Macs definitely had viruses, a few that I got from thrift stores > still have the viruses on them. I don't think there is any memory > protection at all. Software selection for MacOS was pretty crappy, and it > was hard to get under the hood. So protecting yourself from them would be > very difficult on the Mac platform. All the file fork BS, dev tools hard > to get. Also, just like the iPhone pretty much everything was > shareware/commercial, less community stuff than the PC. I feel bad for the > people that grew up on MAcOS versus MS-DOS.
Lest this turn into another chapter in Mac vs DOS: - Yes, classic Macs did get viruses. But as a user of a classic Mac since 1987, I think I encountered one exactly once and my experience was not unusual. They just weren't all that common and nearly everyone ran Virex anyway until Mac OS 8 days when the platform had little or no relevance to virus authors. - You may not have had a command line, but it was perfectly possible to get under the hood. You could mess with resources in MacsBug or ResEdit, shuffle INITs and CDEVs, whatever you like. Such tools were easy to get and freely available. Whether you *liked* the resource/data fork split is a matter of preference but they certainly didn't prohibit mucking around by the knowledgeable and the structured nature of the resource fork in some ways makes it easier. - No, pretty much everything was *not* just shareware/commercial. Look at UMich or Info-Mac for a nearly total refutation of your statement. Freeware existed in quantity commensurate with the platform's penetration and Apple certainly did not discourage it in those days. I have mirrors of them which you can check out: gopher://gopher.floodgap.com/1/archive -- ------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckai...@floodgap.com -- Art is either plagiarism or revolution. -- Paul Gauguin --------------------