Published On Dec 29, 2023
Merry Christmas and happy new year, folks!
"In the year 1988, on the 29th of December, I find a strange floppy disk... labelled "VM VIRUS." That sounds like a fun game, maybe you go around and destroy invaders on your terminal screen? Wait, what's this? It draws Christmas graphics? Hmm, let me run it and find- uh oh. oh no..."
Running CHRISTMA EXEC on an IBM mainframe running VM/HPO 4.2, and causing a massive zero million dollars in damages! The system dates from about 1984-1985 and works great. The system is NOT the PC shown -- that's just the terminal.
I know somebody's gonna ask, so, that PC is a 256 meg Cyrix 6x86 running OS/2 Warp 3, with a SoundBlaster AWE32, 3Com EtherLink II, 8 gig hard disk (to hold an OS/2 2.11 and 4.0 system as well), TCP/IP and SNA networking support, and I used IBM PCOMM (Personal Communications) as the terminal emulator. The VM/CMS system I connected to is an IBM P/390, and, that communication was done over TCP/IP Telnet 3270.