I once got a virus once upon a time on my LC2 Mac - what's an LC2? It's one of Apple's computers from the 90's. I think it had 256 colours and ran system 7. Nice little machine for the time. But I got a virus on it!

A virus on a Mac? Yup! It was the funniest thing ever. I know of only a handful of people who got it and they were all just as confused when they got it. You see, back then viruses were just as plentiful on the PC side of the computer market. But us mac users at the time we're having a good ol' time downloading as we pleased and sharing disks filled with freeware inits and games. There was something very freeing about not having to worry about getting a virus and just doing as you pleased with software. There were many small developers at the time doing all sorts of cool little things (now just a part of your system software). Back then if you wanted functionality, you had to customize everything. There was a download for just about everything on the computer.

The out of the box system didn't give you much at all. So many of us just downloaded neat little things that would do all sorts of weird and crazy things. But no viruses - so it was safe play. Why don't Mac's get viruses? Simple answer - they just dominate the market, why make a virus that only effects 1 out of 20 computers? Plus, Mac's we're never in situations where they had access to critical information like banks or other business places. Most macs at the time were in schools - Apple had a dominant share of the education market - so there's not much of a market for sabotaging little kids computers is there?

Until one afternoon I turned on my computer and as the 'finder' window opened up a full screen pig showed up. It looked as if someone took an icon sized image and blew it up to full screen - it was seriously pixelated. When this pink pig opened up it made an oink oink sound and the whole thing just quit. It was a 10 second kinda deal. I could never find out where it came from or how to repeat it. And believe me, back then you knew every file on your computer - unlike today where an installation of photoshop contains ten thousand little files. Back then, you could look through your system folder and understand what each thing was.

I asked around and found a few people who experienced the same virus. It was hilarious! Never saw it again and it did no damage what so ever. I was a little uneasy about how it got there, but didn't think much of it. It may have been a little apple script virus or something that was time and date sensitive. Who knows, but it makes a great little Apple Mac Virus story!