dac@ukc.ac.uk (David Clear) (11/15/90)
After all the comments about the possibility of virus infection when using a hard disk based TOS I think it's time to take a step back to remember the real issue... TOS2.0. I would like to see the Atari OS and future upgrades on disk - maybe not exclusively, but as an option for people who want it. We can discuss for ever the problem of viruses - the fact is that no matter how you load your OS, a determined person could write a virus which could take your system down. If a virus infected your OS image on disk and then, after a while, trashed the whole of your hard disk then that's obviously bad news. But with a ROM OS the same thing could happen only instead of infecting your OS the virus would infect something else... there is no 100% security... ever. If you get PD/shareware software then you're at risk. If you buy commercial software there's still a possibility of infection. Viruses exist and trojans exist and that's that... and whether your OS is in ROM, RAM, booted from ROM, DISK, tape, punched cards or a hex entry keypad, it won't beat a determined virus. Let's be paranoid for a moment... That copy of Gulam you use... or Uniterm, Mint, MicroRTX or whatever... Did you download that from an archive or copy it from a friend? A friend? Hmmm... Did your friend have it on floppy? If so, does he ever let other people borrow these disks? Are you sure the 8th person before you didn't have a virus in his machine when he took his copy? If you got your software from an archive, who else has write permission on that archive? When's the last time the administrator changed his password? Viruses are a real problem, but I don't think they are an issue in the disk based TOS argument. I feel that a disk based OS from Atari would be a plus in that a) it would be cheap, b) it wouldn't involve opening up your machine or sending it off for eight weeks and c) it would be possible to distribute via usenet at, effectively, no distribution cost to Atari. Maybe I've got a naive or simplistic attitude, but I'd like to think there's a level of support for this idea. Dave.