Happy birthday, Michelangelo.

March 6th is Michelangelos birthday. And no, I don't remember this because Google has changed their graphic logo on their front page.. even more geeky is remembering the Michelangelo virus on the PC many many years back.

Do you guys remember? This was one of the most popular viruses out there -- not spread over the Internet, but rather, by floppy disk. It would spread itself around so quickly and effectively.. really, quite amazing and annoying. Dormant, it was, until March 6th when it would wipe out your file allocation table (FAT) and leave you SOL.

What's funny is that I think that MS-DOS 5.0 rendered this virus useless. Wait a second -- I'm showing my age.

The michaelangelo virus was overhyped IMHO. Everyone was expecting bad things to happen and very little actually did (at least where I was at). Personally, I always thought that the virus it was based on (Stoned/marijuana) was a lot more widespread and caused more damage as well.

Ahh, but the people in the know were prepared for the workaround. Setting the clock to March 7, skipping the target date. (not to mention the DOS 5.0 upgrade) I imagine, too, that a virus like that could hit a lot harder in different geographic areas since it was a floppy-spread virus. It caused a lot of problems here in the Detroit area.. I mean, it was no Nimda, but it did make a mess of tons of FATs.