The Virus

The Virus is one of the oldest, most wide spread, and most intricate computer viruses. It is an epidemia so common on PCs that for most PC users The Virus has become an integral part of a PC. If The Virus has taken over a PC it uses hiddenly the PCs internet connection and it annoys the user in unpredictable patterns with visual and acoustic effects, by popping up windows, or with a crash or hangup.

The Virus uses up most of a computer's resources for its own operations, leaving only little for applications. This lead to a continued struggle by users to buy more powerful PCs to have enough resources remaining to do something useful. However, not long after the basis of more powerful PCs reaches a certain threshold, a new, larger mutations of The Virus will start to appear, which occupy most of the added resources. (The strain of initially short-lived "beta" mutations will stabilize within a year or so.)

The grown Virus will exploit the available additional resources to implement new user annoyances, and to turn the PC into a hostile environment for some applications (and viruses, see below) which were common enough to seriously impede The Virus's utilization of the PC's resources. Such applications may cease to work properly in the new environment. Other applications have less problems adapting. One certain family of applications even seems to be mostly immune against The Virus's manipulations of the environment, which gives them a competitive advantage, so that they have become, over time, the most common applications on PCs infected by The Virus, so-called opportunistic followers. (It is said that The Virus and these immune applications have some evolutionary links, which shows in some shared code segments.)

The Virus weakens a PC so much that, once infected by The Virus, the PC becomes easy pray for other viruses. In fact, the whole phenomenon of computer viruses exists nearly exclusively on PCs where The Virus's suppression of some applications has paved the way for large numbers of applications immune against it (but not against other viruses). Most viruses co-evolved with The Virus and these applications, and now can only thrive in an environment shaped by The Virus's infection. Note that a recent trend in The Virus's evolution seems to be the acquisition of techniques for fending off other viruses in the competition over the PC's resources.

A major weakness of The Virus is its volatility to changes to the computing environment (hardware or software) which will usually send it into a freeze mode, where it blocks all the computer's resources, leaving reset as the only way out. However, since technically The Virus is a boot sector virus (started by turning on the PC, not only by running a certain application), The Virus will begin running during reboot, which gives it the necessary head-start to excert its control over the new hard- or software. (Being a boot sector virus, The Virus can also be very particular to the use of boot managers.)

The uniqueness of The Virus's success is based on the use of unconventional replication schemes: In its early evolutionary stages, whose roots are lost in history, The Virus was still rather primitive. The first serious variant (dubbed 3.0) appeared in the mid-1980s. It and the following mutations (3.1 and 3.1.1) increased their spread by employing the human user(!): The user was persuaded to copy The Virus from a friend's PC to its own (a "poor man's virus" [such a virus has also been called "Romanian virus", however I lost that e-mail ...]). But PC manufacturers are The Virus's most effective path of distribution. Instead of just hopping from one PC to another, The Virus infiltrated PC manufacturers, enabling it to infect virtually every new-born PC (in its latest, most evolved version!). The Virus split into two evolutionary branches (NT and 2000 on one side, and 95, 98 and ME on the other), but these might reunify again in the future. One also speculates when The Virus will evolve the capability to use the internet to distribute itself and to exchange its latest mutations between PCs.