Since we are in days of cyber attacks (threatened or real), the memory of what happened in the world exactly thirty years ago: March 6, 1992. There was not yet the Web, in fact, but only the Internet, and yet personal computers were becoming very popular. And for the first time there was panic: a virus, it was said, had infected millions of computers and would destroy their contents on March 6. Why precisely on March 6? It was never known. But the person who noticed this, on February 4, 1991, in a shop in Melbourne, Australia, he talked about the fact with a friend who was born on March 6 and noticed the coincidence with the fact that on March 6, 1475, Michelangelo, the great Renaissance artist, was born, and so the two thought of calling him that, the virus: Michelangelo, a powerful name, which looked good in the headlines, destined to be very successful.
The discovery of the virus happened by chance: after installing a program, a shopkeeper noticed that strange symbols appeared on the monitor; he turned to an expert, Roger Riordan, who did a check and discovered that a virus had been installed on that pc (a “boot sector virus”) that would be activated automaticallyprecisely on March 6.
It was not the first computer virus in history, but he was the first to cause a sensation. A few months before the deadline of the ultimatum, newspapers and TV channels spoke of a global attack on the world‘s PCs: “Thousands of PCs could break on Friday,” headlined USA Today, while the Washington Post warned that “A deadly virus threatens disasters tomorrow “. CNN sent a crew to the office of a British programmer based in the United States that they had predicted “destruction of 5 million computers”. He was called John McAfeeand five years earlier he had founded the company of the same name to produce antivirus software and which has literally taken off since then: six months later si quotò a Wall Street raising $ 42 million.
The alarm, as they say in these cases, proved to be greatly exaggerated. Only a few thousand computers were affected. In short, as he always noticed il Washington Post, “Michelangelo pc virus wasn’t quite an epidemic”. E l’Associated Press notò: ““The day of techno-doom turned out to be a dud”. A data. Of the 250,000 AT&T computers around the world, only two had problems. No disaster, the end of the world postponed. But on the other hand, antivirus sales soared. And computer viruses have never left us ever since.
Note: you are not never discovered the author by Michelangelo.