Funny to see that a computer virus was such huge, mysterious news back then; now they’re released by the hundreds every week.
That video game was E.T.
And in the scene with president, that guy in the very end was Charles Gray. Among his many roles, I always remember him as the narrator/criminologist from The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
It was Dade Murphy, the 12 year old kid who crashed 1507 computers in one day, including Wall Street trading systems, singlehandedly causing a 7 point drop of the New York Stock Market.
Ah yes, the good old days. (I think I had that news-readers blouse.) You little whippersnappers are probably too young to know this, but there is a reason this news story was treated so melodramatically. At the time, the nation was at the height of its AIDS-virus hysteria, we were just coming off a culture-wide belief that we’d all die from a nuclear war, and there were none too few people who thought computers were “devil-machines” that were ushering in the Anti-Christ (sadly most of those seem to be a member of my husband’s family). Anything with the word virus was just red meat for the news media.
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12 Comments so far. Leave a comment below.Funny to see that a computer virus was such huge, mysterious news back then; now they’re released by the hundreds every week.
That video game was E.T.
And in the scene with president, that guy in the very end was Charles Gray. Among his many roles, I always remember him as the narrator/criminologist from The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
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It was the Amish guy.
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This was a time when the size of computer screens and the size of eyeglass lenses were roughly the same.
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I don’t remember The Edge having that much facial hair.
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It was Dade Murphy, the 12 year old kid who crashed 1507 computers in one day, including Wall Street trading systems, singlehandedly causing a 7 point drop of the New York Stock Market.
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Damn kids!
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Is that Robin from Howard Stern?
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dzzqFFKwOik
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absolutly hilarious the news did not know what the hell was going on
president mr president
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Ah yes, the good old days. (I think I had that news-readers blouse.) You little whippersnappers are probably too young to know this, but there is a reason this news story was treated so melodramatically. At the time, the nation was at the height of its AIDS-virus hysteria, we were just coming off a culture-wide belief that we’d all die from a nuclear war, and there were none too few people who thought computers were “devil-machines” that were ushering in the Anti-Christ (sadly most of those seem to be a member of my husband’s family). Anything with the word virus was just red meat for the news media.
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lol what the…. why is there footage of the E.T. Atari game? They couldn’t have possibly think a video game was related to this story, could they?
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Well, ET was a virus for Atari, except it had delivered its payload a long time earlier and bombed them almost out of existence.
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