Follow

@a2_4am When doing your archival work and the like, how much do you worry about the Apple II and IIgs viruses that existed back then and bringing them forward into the present?

· · Web · 1 · 0 · 0

@david Not at all, really. "The present" is a series of emulation environments that are started up and shut down in an instant and have no persistence between them. All my virtual floppy drives are write-disabled by the emulator unless I enable it temporarily for testing, but I'll only do that on a temporary duplicate of the .woz file because I don't want the program's own data written to the disk either.

@a2_4am how concerned should I be with real hardware and real data using images from the internet?

@david I would trust any disk image from Asimov FTP. On 8-bit Apple II machines, there's no persistence of any kind after openapple-control-reset. (On a IIgs the answer is more complicated.) If you have a hard drive, any floppies you boot could potentially write to it, but it's really a very minimal risk. There are anti-virus programs from back in the day if you want.

Sign in to participate in the conversation
Cross Family's Mastodon

The social network of the future: No ads, no corporate surveillance, ethical design, and decentralization! Own your data with Mastodon!