Although reduction in sneaker-net has virtually eliminated boot-sector spread.
On Sun, 14 Jan 2018, Tapley, Mark wrote:
I never made that connection before! Glad you toed me.
There had already been some reduction. The first PCs with a hard disk would always attempt to boot from floppy first. Once it was possible to rearrange the boot sequence to try the hard disk first, we had a substantial reduction in boot sector virus incidents.
MOST boot sector virus infections on hard disks could be trivially solved by the [undocumented at that time] /MBR option of FDISK.COM
The "Alameda" Virus was first discovered [and thoroughly analyzed] in our ("Merritt College") lab. (We had a good idea of who might have been the author) One of the student workers at our sister college, "College Of Alameda", who was brother of a guy who wrote a book on the subject, asked nicely for naming rights.
A few years later, the administration informed me that they had waived the computer literacy requirement for a student transferring to Yale. A few months later, Yale "discovered" it, and named it "Yale Virus".
