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and its ability to be out of touch is such that in show business the offer of a Time cover story is considered a sure sign that the unfortunate star’s career is on the wane. Not that anyone has ever turned down a cover story -- Time is still the most influential publication in America, and what it says is believed.

So, when Time headlined its cover about computer viruses ‘Invasion of the Data Snatchers!’, its readers were more than certain that data was indeed being snatched. The magazine detailed an attack on a local newspaper office by the Brain virus, the account including phrases such as ‘deliberate act of sabotage’. Brain, Time said, was ‘pernicious’, ‘small but deadly’ and ‘only one of a swarm of infectious programs that have descended on US computer users this year’. The magazine also announced: ‘In the past nine months, an estimated 250,000 computers have been hit with similar contagions.’

The article captured perfectly the hyperbole about viruses: Brain was far from pernicious and it certainly wasn’t deadly. There was no swarm of viruses: the number then proven to have infected systems -- as opposed to those conjured up in the imaginations of virus researchers -- was probably less than ten. And as for the estimate that 250,000 computers had been hit by viruses, it was just that -- an estimate. No one at the time had any real idea how many computer sites had been affected by viruses.

The Time writer also dug deep to unearth the ‘Cookie Monster’, which had appeared during the 1970s at a number of American colleges. Inspired by a TV character, this joke program displayed a message on a computer screen: ‘I want a cookie.’ If the user typed in ‘cookie’ it would disappear, but, if the message was ignored, it kept reappearing with increasing frequency, becoming ever more insistent. In reality the Cookie Monster wasn’t a virus, even in the broadest definition of the term: it was a joke program introduced by a prankster on a single computer, it had no ability to replicate and it couldn’t travel surreptitiously from machine to machine.

Time did recognize that ‘the alarm caused by these . . . viruses was amplified by two groups with a vested interest in making the threat seem as dramatic as possible’. These were the computer security specialists and the computer press, ‘a collection of highly competitive weekly tabloids that have seized on the story like pit bulls, covering