> Long ago I read about a low-level virus (probably a boot-sector > virus) that was designed to be "non damaging" on the intended > microcomputer platform, but which had unintended damaging consequences > when executed on a mainframe. [There was no discussion about how the > virus got onto the mainframe, though.] The reason the same virus was > damaging on the mainframe supposedly had to do with the difference in > how the mainframe interpreted the assembly instructions. > > The author was intending to indicate that writing even a seemingly > undamaging virus could have unintended consequences because it is > impossible to know every place that the code could execute. > > I've never seen an actual instance of such a thing happening in > practice, and I doubt I ever will, but it stuck in my mind as an > interesting quirk to contemplate.
Sounds like FUD to me. The mainframe instruction set is absolutely nothing like Intel (or anything else, for that matter). Plus you don't move executables from a PC onto a mainframe, and you don't directly mount storage from the mainframe. You also don't boot from disk storage on the mainframe except in very special ways (and only recently - for instance it's not even really standard practice to boot linux using a disk installed bootloader, unless you're running it in a lpar near bare iron. You'd instead use z/VM to boot the kernel out-of-body from the Linux system, by formatting it into a virtual punch deck for IPL). There definitely wasn't going to be any direct-attach storage mounting off mainframes "long ago". -m
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