A History of Anti-Virus Software

Where Virus Program Came From

Antivirus program has evolved a lot over the years. It is hard to as viruses have been getting trickier to catch & have been attacking at much faster rates. Worse than that, viruses have been designed these days to do over generate nuisances, however great, & are now able to virtually steal from computer users by spying on them. Viruses can affect any program or computer by accessing your IP online.

Way Back When:

In the beginning of the computer age there weren't any viruses to be concerned about. The idea was out there & there were definitely issues from time to time, but nothing in the way of what is being seen today was even conceived of. The truth is, the first true virus, that replicated itself successfully, was created as a joke. There was no need for antivirus program & so none existed.

The mid 80s saw things get ugly:

By the mid-1980s computer use in the house was taking off. Increasingly offices were seeing typewriters get tossed out the windows only to get replaced by full functioning computers. Suddenly there were all of these targets showing up & amateur programmers were taking it as a challenge to program viruses that much amounted to vandalism, as they destroyed knowledge & such. Suddenly antivirus program was needed & by 1987 it existed.

Few people turned to it at first:

At first there was little attention paid to warnings about viruses. Business was the first to adopt such measures but home users didn't have any need. At the time the worst a virus would do was destroy knowledge & therefore regular backing up of a hard drive appeared to be adequate. Also, viruses spread by floppy disks because the net was not in every home. In lieu of paying for protective program people tried to be cautious of cautious of where they put their disks.

The net was in all places & so were the viruses:

When the net age took off in the 90s viruses had a whole new way to travel around from place to place. They no longer needed to attach themselves to floppy disks & wait to be accidentally installed. In the early days of the net, all a virus writer had to do was place the file somewhere & fool a user in to downloading & opening it. Or work, back then viruses could only spread through executable code. Still, the necessity for antivirus program took off.

Virus writing still appeared slow & so was updates:

For a long while it was hard to update the knowledge base of an antivirus program. Things weren't as they were today where the programs check for & install their own updates. That said, there was little opportunity for updating anyway as updates came slowly. Today some program gets updated every day but even as recent as a few years ago it was as rare as every month.

& now they check for everything:

These days there is dozens of genres of threats against our computers & so antivirus program is no longer that. It now searches for malware of all kinds including adware & adware. They come with firewall applications & the ability to identify & search new drives & files on the fly with no