ted@maui.cs.ucla.edu (Theodore Bujewski) (03/08/91)
I would like to preface this by saying that I do not know if there is a virus in Mandelbrot.top or not but I thought I should say something just in case there is. Better safe than sorry. I downloaded Mandelbrot.top from the Purdue ftp sight yesterday and installed it on my machine. Mandelbrot.top is a program which draws lots of neat figures. After launching the program I drew a torus and that worked fine. When I decided to draw a fractal, it accessed my external scsi disk for a long time. This is strange because the program is stored on my internal disk and the system is on the external disk so I don't know what it was doing accessing the external disk. When it came back from the external disk I got the spinning disk on my screen which went on for quit some time. There was no way I could stop the program. I couldn't even turn the power off on the keyboard. Does any one know what to do in a situation like this? Finally I turned off the computer by turning off my circuit breaker. Now when I try to reboot the machine, it tries to reboot for a short time and then freezes. So I don't know if I messed the machine up by turning it off like I did or if Mandelbrot did something to my system files when it was accessing my external disk. I also might have had prblems because I have ver. 2.0 of the system and this was a 1.0 program. I thought they were compatible. I am posting this just in case it is a virus. Any comments on what may be the cause of this or what to do to break out of a situation like this (other than pulling the plug) would be most appreciated. Ted