80-Bus News

later, so my first library file was made up of the bits of LU, including the documentation. No I didn’t then erase LU from the system disk, it stayed there until I wanted to use it, then the problem. The documentation was in the library, and I couldn’t remember the syntax to make it work. After about half an hour trying all the tricks I could think of that wouldn’t take too long, (including trying to load the library into a debugger but it was too big) I resorted to phoneing Richard who promptly reminded me that all commands are prefixed with a ‘−’. That solved the problem and away I went.

The documentation for LU is ‘something else’. It’s 32K long, and if you reckon I go on a bit, you should try reading the LU documentation! I think the command summary should take up about half a page, after all there are only 9 simple commands. And perhaps another page of warnings, tricks, etc. That’s about 4K at best. I can’t say I’ve read all the guff that came with LU, so perhaps I’ve missed the one vital command which gives you a list of commands from inside the program, but I doubt if there is one.

To give an idea of space saving with LU, take my dBASE master disks, there’s five in all and tot up to about 900K (allocated on 4K blocks). Squeeze all that lot using SOQ or SWEEP brings it down to about 700K. Then shove the squeezed file into a library, the library ended up at about 330K. In fact I got the whole of dBASE 2.41 and dBASE 2.43 on to the same disk with room to spare. So the space saving with LU was quite fantastic.

The other problem LU cures is getting things mixed up. Lots of different suites of programs have a program call Install (or other similarly named files). Try running the wrong install on a program, and brother, have you got problems. Previously I kept different suites of programs on different disk user areas, but this still wasted space. With LU, all the different parts of a suite of programs are all tucked away in one file and can’t get lost or mixed up.

VIRUS

Back to the wasted space at the end of a block in a CP/M directory, someone came up with a real lulu of an evil idea. I don’t know how far he went with the idea, for all I know, it might be out there lurking, but it should have been {or will be} a real block buster if it’s ever done.

The program was to be called VIRUS, and like a virus, it was to be self propagating and infect the world silently until the symptoms struck an unsuspecting world computer population almost at once. The idea goes something like this:

VIRUS is introduced into an executable file by the perpetrator of the crime, and that file is given to someone else. The next time that program is executed, the program loads into the TPA as usual, but before the program executes, VIRUS executes first, because the start jump of the program has been changed to VIRUS instead of the program. VIRUS throws a random number and goes and gets a directory entry from the unsuspecting persons disk. VIRUS then checks four things, first that the directory entry is a .COM file, secondly it has a start jump (most CP/M programs have, and if it has VIRUS saves it), third, that there is space at the end of the last block for VIRUS to lurk (could be difficult that, but a clever programmer could probably crack it), and fourth, VIRUS is not already resident in that space.

Given that all four conditions are satisfied, VIRUS copies itself into the wasted space at the end of the last block using the CP/M 2.2 random access ability, changes the start jump to itself and changes its exit jump to the jump at the start of the program so the program will execute after VIRUS. One last thing. In copying itself, it decrements an internal counter by one.

Get the idea, VIRUS has now infected another program. Next time either that program or the previous program is executed, VIRUS will infect another program and so on. The infection process would only take a few tenths of a second, and the user would be totally unaware of what was happening. So the guy with infected disks gives a copy of some program to another person, who also catches VIRUS, who in turn passes it to someone else. All the time the counters are decrementing.

When the counters get to zero, the program refuses to run and up pops a message:

Your Program Has Virus.  Send  £5.00 to
P.O. Box 1 Brighton For Decontamination Program!

If the counters were set to a fairly large number, and VIRUS were introduced into the right places, like NASTUG and the Merseyside Users Group, the natural process of swapping disks between folks could go on for some considerable time before the symptoms break. Exit our hero with a small fortune and a lot of angry guys on his tail. Angry guys? Yes probably, as VIRUS would have infected proprietory programs as well as rip-offs. And as for chasing him, well I’ll be one jump ahead of the pack, ’cos I know whose idea it was in the first place. Nice thought though.

The Gemini GM870 MODEM

They’ve arrived at last. The Gemini GM870 MODEM cards that is. What a delight, both for me and BT. Me because I’d been waiting for one for some time, and BT because my usually frugal phone bill has been taking a walloping.

So what do you get? An all ‘bells and whistles’ auto-dial, auto-answer MODEM all on one card