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Amiga Virus Protection - Boot Virus Hardware Virus-Trap
Do you remember the good old times, when there were no worms, no malware, which will
spy on your bank account, but just plain boot virii, which spread around just to
show a message ?
I do, those were the days when no networking was available to home computers such as the
Amiga 500 in 1988.
Those boot virii - as harmless as they have been - did some damage anyway. Some diskettes
(remember those too ?) had a special boot-loader to read a foreign data format, and if
some virus was copying itself to the boot sector of the diskette, the boot-loader vanished
and the whole diskette became useless.
But there was a very neat hardware protection. The external drive port had a signal pin, which
went to low when the head of the drive was over the boot sectors. So connecting this signal
to the write-protect signal of the drive port solved the whole boot virus issue.
This schematic shows how this was done:
The signal /TK0 (Track 0) was connected to /WPRO (write-protect) via a diode (1N4148).
A led was showing if the virus-trap was enabled or disabled. Furthermore it could be
switched on and off with switch 1 (S1).
Last-Modified: Sun, 30 Oct 2005 20:57:34 GMT
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