A summary for those that haven’t been keeping up with this series:
I found a number of 5.25″ disks at a thrift store a number of years ago. I finally got around to acquiring a 5.25″ disk drive and extracting the contents a while back. Since then I have been posting the contents here.
Based on the contents, at least some of these disks were apparently once owned by someone named Connie who used to run the “Close Encounters” Special Interest Group (SIG) on Delphi in the mid 1980s.
A specific definition of this SIG was found in a document on one of the disks: “This SIG, known as ‘Close Encounters’, is a forum for the discussion of relationships that develop via computer services like the Source, CompuServe, and Delphi. Our primary emphasis is on the sexual aspects of those relationships.”
This service was text based and was accessed via whatever terminal program you used on your computer to dial in to Delphi’s servers. Many of these disks have forum messages, e-mails and chat session logs. All of this is pre-internet stuff and I don’t know if there are any archives in existence today of what was on Delphi in the 1980s. In any case, much of this stuff would have been private at the time and probably wouldn’t be in such archives even if they existed.
This post includes the contents of DANGER.DOC which is dated September 30th, 1985. This is some kind of announcement I’m assuming was sent out by Delphi. Basically, it warns about various trojans and names some specific shareware files to avoid because of malicious behavior.
See the previous post here.
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DANGER.DOC
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SEP EXIT + 6 26-SEP NEW GOODIE BRIEF 7 23-SEP MANAGERS CONFERENCE BRIEF 8 15-SEP PEABO AND DICK EVANS (BRIEF) ANNOUNCE>(SCAN, READ, HELP or EXIT): read 2 2 30-SEP VERY BAD SOFTWARE WARNING EXCERPT FROM THE AUSTIN PC USERS GROUP NEWSLETTER 9/85 Warning: Someone is trying to destroy your data. Beware of the SUDDEN upsurge of "Trojan Horse" programs on Bulletin Boards and in the public domain. These programs purport to be useful utilities, but, in reality, they are designed to sack your system. One has shown up as EGABTR, a program that claims to show you how to maximize the features of IBM's Enhanced Graphics Adapter, and has also been spotted as a new super-directory program. It actually erases the file allocation tables on your hard disk. For good measure, it asks you to put a disk in Drive A:, then another in Drive B:. After it has erased those FAT's too it displays, "Got You! Arf! Arf!" Don't run any public-domain program that is not a known quantity. Have someone you know and trust vouch for it. ALWAYS examine it FIRST with DEBUG, looking for all the ASCII strings and data. If there is anything even slightly suspicious about it, do a cursory disassembly. Be wary of disk calls (INTERRUPT 13H), especially if the program has no business writing to the diskl. Run your system in Floppy only mode with write protect tabs on the disk on junk disks in the drives. Another bit of information came from the ARPANET: Be careful what you put into your machine. There is out there making the rounds of the REMOTE BULLETIN BOARDS a program called VDIR.COM. It is a little hard to tell what the program is supposed to do. What it actually does is TRASH your system. It writes garbage onto ANY disk it can find, including hard disks, and flashes up various messages telling you what is doing. It's a TIME BOMB: once run, you can't be sure what will happpen next because it doesn't always do anything immediately. At a later time, though, it can CRASH your system. Does this remind you of some of the imbecillic copy-protection schemes threatened by companies such as Vault and Defendisk? Anyway, you'd do well to avoid VDIR.COM. I expect there are a couple of harmless-perhaps even useful=Public Domain programs floating about with the name VDIR; and, of course, anyone warped enough to launch this kind of trap once, can do it again. Be careful about untested "Free" software. Two other files that we are aware of that will also do damage as reported in the past: STAR.EXE Presents a screen of stars then copies RBBS-PC.DEF and renames it. The caller then calls back later and d/l the innocently named file, and he then has the SYSOP's and all the Users' passwords. SECRET.BAS This file was left on an RBBS with a message saying that the caller got the file from a mainframe, and could not get the file to run in his PC, and asked someone to try it out. When it was executed, it formatted all disks on the system. (This file DANGER.DOC from JIMNET bulletin board - Austin, TX; Sept 85) ANNOUNCE>(SCAN, READ, HELP or EXIT):
