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named Pamela Kane told writer Ralph Roberts about the Sunnyvale Slug, which flashed the message, ‘Greetings from Sunnyvale. Can you find me?’ on infected machines. But it has never been confirmed as a virus, nor seen since Kane first reported it. Then there was the ‘retro-virus’, reported to have been distributed with three popular but unnamed shareware (free, shared software) programs. It was said to have been programmed to detach itself from its infected hosts – a program or file – and then to reinfect them at some future date. It was ‘like a submarine rigged for silent running . . . the retro-virus waits until the destroyers have stowed their depth charges and gone back to port before returning to sink ships,’ it was claimed, somewhat colourfully, in the computing journal InfoWorld. The retro-virus was without doubt the most sinister virus yet reported but it had been seen only once – by the researcher who reported it.

The CVIA was not averse to creating a few myths of its own. Its chairman, John McAfee, an ebullient and eminently quotable computer expert, was always available to fill in the press on the irresistible spread of viruses. He was a good interviewee, with a store of anecdotes about computer viruses and reports of virus attacks at generally unidentified companies and institutions, and he managed to give the impression that each anecdote could lead to a thousand more, that each incident was representative of a hundred others. In 1988 and 1989 reports about viruses always intimated that what was public knowledge was only the tip of the iceberg – that the problem was much bigger, much wider and much more pervasive than anyone suspected. Perspective was lost in the race to hype the problem. Far from being the tip of the iceberg, what was being seen was the whole thing – and even that through a prism. But the hype had its effect, and sales of anti-virus software soared.

Born in science fiction, legitimized by academia and institutionalized by the Computer Virus Industry Association, the computer virus came of age on 26 September 1988, when it made the front cover of Time magazine.

Time was once derided as the publication ‘for those that can’t think’ (its sister publication, Life, was ‘for those who can’t read’). It is known for its middle-brow analyses and overwrought cover stories,