Old School MS-DOS Viruses In Action

1. Elvira, virus by French programmer Spanska, replicated the Star Wars opening crawl in an ode to his girlfriend.

2. Virus.DOS.Phantom1 is menacing--but also clearly a labor of love.

3. Virus.DOS.Walker displays a crude bit of 8-bit porno not shown and then has an old man stroll across your screen.

4. Virus.DOS.Kuku infects all EXE and COM files, and, one time out of eight, displays this lovely colorful confetti on your screen.

5. Virus.DOS.Plane unleashes a parachuter on your command line, creating infected companion files for COMs and EXEs.

6. Virus.Boot.Pingpong doesn't destroy anything, but it does turn your screen into a game of ping pong but only if you try to run files on the half hour seriously.

7. "Mars Land," another one of Spanksa's viruses, shows a lovely lava flow with a nice message: Coding a virus can be creative.

8. Markt DOS Virus looks scary--and it is: it formats your entire C drive.

9. Ithaqua DOS Virus is just plain nice. Every April 29 it takes over your screen to show a gentle snowfall.

10. Virus.DOS.Billiards turns your boring text into a colorful game of pool. Nice!

11. Virus.DOS.HHnHH, a bouncing particle ball, wouldn't make a bad screensaver.

12. Apple DOS Trojan proves that even in the underground world of DOS viruses, fanboys were fanboys.

13. PlayGame DOS Virus makes the unfortunate user play a game upon booting up, but only in December.

14. Virus.DOS.Redcode plays out a little race between Big Butt Gasso and Himmler Fewster. Weird.

15. CMOS DOS Virus is an evil virus indeed. Along with this seizure-inducing payload and a shrieking beeping noise, it corrupts the CMOS memory, wiping all sorts of settings. The most diabolical bit? If you try to press Control Alt Delete, it reformats your whole hard drive.