Sometime in 1994, someone thought it would be funny to start a rumor that if you got an email message with Goodtimes
in the subject line, merely opening the message would run the Goodtimes virus, and erase your hard drive. It went around for years, being forwarded by everyone and their brother.
The thing was, it was a hoax. There was NO WAY for email to transmit a virus that could hurt you simply by opening the email. Not only that, but at the time most people actually read their email on a different machine than the one they worked on all day. They’d use a program called telnet
to connect to their mail server, and read it with a program on the server, something like pine, or elm.
My how times change. People started using email programs right on their own computer. This made it so that a virus could come to your computer, but you’d still have to save it, open it, and run it yourself. Microsoft was the first company to think that this process should be automated for you. Just about all of the famous world-wide computer virus outbreaks have been compliments of Microsoft.
Thanks to Bill, Goodtimes is real.
