I suppose it is hard for any pre-internet virus to compare in terms of damage to these 5, but one that stands out in my mind:

Form (circa 1990 or so), and its variants like Form.A would infect the boot sector of your hard drive, and from there could infect any floppy disk that you used on the computer. Most PCs at the time would try to boot from a floppy disk left in the drive, which would spread the infection.

I guess that many variants didn't really do much of anything particularly bad, but I got Form.A one time and it nuked the Master Boot Record (like virus #5 in the video) of my PC. Since DOS / Windows (3.1 at the time I think) wouldn't boot, I (mistakenly) assumed that it had formatted my hard drive, and then lost all of my data by reformatting.

I remember a span of about a year where any 3.5 inch floppy disk being passed around offices or schools in my home town had a roughly 80% chance of being infected with Form.A. So that seems like a pretty impressive infection and spread rate, without advantage of being able to spread through the internet!

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I remember when I had an early day at work, being the first one in my office - and I got an email with an attachment "LOVE-LETTER-FOR-YOU.txt.vbs".

I spotted it for the virus it was, and sent out warning notices to the other colleagues. Some of them still opened it, though.


And then I understood the morale of it all: Early bird gets the worm.

I will never understand why Windows defaults to hiding filename extensions... Not that it would have helped most User = ID10T problems like that, but at least displaying extensions encourages some degree of curiosity and diligence.

Form.A sounds a lot like the Stoner virus, I'm assuming one of those was a variant of the other. Some OEM's were unknowingly sending out floppies with that virus on them with peripherals for a while which really helped them spread.

I always thought the Michelangelo virus was a pretty serious one for pre-internet days.

Post internet, the Code Red virus was especially hard to get rid of. It never touched the disk so most scanners had a hard time with it.

This sounds very familiar both by name and action. I'm sure I had it or something very similar once, but I had Windows (whatever version) on CD. In the end, I think I just reinstalled windows from CD (which at the time couldn't be written to even if I'd wanted) which overwrote the old infected MBR.

Having it on CD doesn't even given me a decent time frame on the version or virus, because my dad was either building computers or modding and playing with them since Acorn. I used to put annoying 7+ disk stuff like the Indiana Jones and Monkey Island games onto CD as backup, so it's reasonable to think we might have done it with Windows.

Maybe that was many years later and a different virus, but when I read "form.a" I shuddered involuntarily.

I worked at one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in 2005 and I came into work late one day in August. I found people standing around the parking lot smoking cigarettes saying every last computer was infected, I thought they were exaggerating. Nope, every last networked computer was infected by whatever worm was going around, thousands of them. IT took away admin rights for most desktop user accounts after that one.

"Took away"?

Yeesh.

I'm not sure I understand, what is so odd about IT management removing admin rights for most users after the entire site got infected by the Zotob worm?

Takes me back to the first time I had to deal with a virus infection... not on my machine, thankfully, but much every Acorn machine (and every floppy disk) in my secondary school was infected with the "ICON" virus. Didn't do any harm (besides taking up space), but it was really annoying to get rid of as it would re-infect stuff almost as quickly as you were cleaning them.

The ironic thing was that it took me months to rid of that pest and then a week later I got a computer mag with a free anti-virus on the cover disk that would disinfect a computer in minutes instead of hours....