Full Article:
http://www.edgeofbeyond.net/boards/index.php?topic=7248.0
Mainframe:
Mainframe was a computer with dual hardrives (Mainframe and Twin City fit the diagrams in my Tech manuals for a dual hardrive system perfectly).It is the computer system at Mainframe Entertainment used to compile their animation (one of Mainframes computers met a similar fate to Twin City during the making of the Money For Nothin' video).Most likely Mainframe is what its name suggests a Mainframe computer designed specifically to crunch numbers as evident by all the Binomes running around compared to the few programs (sprites).For optimal performance all the programs were installed on one hardrive while the numbers were crunched and information those numbers made up were stored on the second hardrive till they were written to tape drive (since this was the early 90's and that was the best way to store and cary arround gigabytes of data.)The only programs on the number crunching drive (Mainframe) would have been the nessessary ones like a command.com and other files that make up the formatting of a harddrive, everything else would have been binomes.
Twin City Disaster:
At some point the Users at Mainframe decided to hook their Mainframe computer directly to the Net. Other PCs at Mainframe were probably already connected to the Net but the Mainframe was not until this moment.It could be that the Mainframe was brand new or that it simply hadn't needed to be online or directly connected to other PCs at Mainframe (if it had been connected to ther PCs they would have known about life outside their own system).The User probably went to a newsgroup or public file library at a university as thats about all there was back then to test the Network.They obviously didn't have high security, this was common at the time, because they were immediately hit by a virus. As stated in Mainframe Entertainments early ReBoot background info the User thought he was downloading a word document in actuallity he downloaded a virus.Its tough to say which precise virus the User downloaded because it would have to contain both Hex and Megabyte but it was probably a custom variant of Virdem one variant is called Killer which fits really well with Kilobyte aka Killer-byte/Killa-byte.When the text message of Virdem and its variants are removed it becomes two shorter variants Virdem 792 and Virdem 824.The user downloaded the word program and basically ripped the text from the virus and split it into two.
The Megabyte+Hex=Killer-byte Equation:
Heres Virdems offical statistics:
NAME: Virdem
SIZE: 1336
TYPE: Non-resident COM-files
REPAIR: Almost always
This virus was written in 1986, which makes it one of the oldest viruses in existence. It was written by R. Burger, the author of "Computer Viruses: A High-Tech Disease". It is not a threat in unmodified form, as the virus makes it quite clear that the program has been infected. Virdem overwrites the first part of the program and appends the original code to the end of the file. Two similar variants of this virus are known - one with all the text strings in German, but the other is an English language version.
VARIANT: Killer
This variant is of the same length as the original, but the text messages have been changed.
VARIANT: Virdem 792, Virdem 824
Two shorter variants, possibly created by removing the text messages, or they might be earlier variants of the virus.
Megabyte makes it quite clear when he infects something so this fits for me. The only things that don't match are that Megabyte and Hex are Resident and can not infect .COM files but their where destructive, resident versions made and being variants that split off. Virdem they don't have to match the descriptions perfectly.Virdem would be considered benign the Killer variant probably wasn't.Anyway for the sake of keeping it as simple as possible I'm calling them Virdem variants.
Anyway whatever Killabyte, Hex, and Megs, were they destroyed the Twin City Hardrive.The Users acted fast and copied all they could over to Mainframe. (The survivors Dot and The Guardians were rounding up in the Flashbacks of Daemon rising.) Most of the program files were destroyed as well as most system files which is why Mainframe is so sparce and the P.O. is so far behind and limited in technology.It was on the other drive not on the one for number crunching. Luckily the Users were capable enough to recover enough data from Twin City to keep Mainframe as a working Operating System. With a virus on their computer the techs at Mainframe were able to log onto the Supercomputer (University) and get an antivirus for Virdem (the most likely culprit).Sadly for the techs the Virus was not Virdem but a variant so the Antivirus (Bob) could only stop and slow Virdem not erase or completely cure it.Thus Megabyte and Hex lived happily in Mainframe never fully able to conquer the system because of Bob.
The Supercomputer and the Guardians:
Next up the Supercomputer is most likely a Universities Computer system.At the time Universities were the biggest Network hubs in exsistence outside of the Military.Universities commonly maintained the security of the Net and when a virus came out University techs had to come up with ways to stop it their were no Antivirus companies at the time but their were antivirus programs created and distributed by Universities.Eventually the Net grew to big for Universities to police and when the world wide web became big it became impossible to maintain complete control, and thus Antivirus companies were founded.So Turbo and the Guardians are Antivirus programs on the SC.
The World Wide Web:
In the early stages of the Web it was a chaotic jumbled bunch of information that was nearly impossible to navigate.It was just thousands of computers with tons of information. If you wanted to find anything you had to have early search engines called Spiders/Crawlers the pathways of the Web looking for anything within the Users search parametors. In its early days it owuld have been as ReBoot depicted it. Offically the World Wide Web oppened March 1989 and was easier to use thanks to crawlers but it wasn't amed until HTML, FTP, and Web Browsers came out and made it navigable like the Net.The Web was Young at this time it was in its earliest developments the foundations .If ReBoot were set in today's timethe Web would be much like the Net.
Daemon Rising:
Daemon is with out a doubt based on the Morris Internet Worm.Mainframe took a few liberties here and there but its definitely based on the incident I'll refer to the Morris internet worm as Daemon because its faster to type. On November 2nd 1988 around 6:00 PM Daemon went active as Morris released the worm into the Net from MIT.But Morris soon realized that the worm was spreading faster than it was supposed to their was a bug and the worm was now out of control.The worm began to spread across the Net. By 8:49 PM the Worm had reached a Supercomputer at the University of Utah a VAX 8600 SC specifically and At 9:09 began to use its resources to spread itself.Antivirus programs were useless against it because the few types of viruses they could deal with were nothing like a worm.
The average load (the measure of how hard the PC is working) on Vax 8600 by internet users at the time was 1 by 9:21 the worm had upped the load to 5, by 10:01 16, by 10:06 the load becomes 100, the supercomputer is at the worms mercy nothing else can be loaded, no Users can use the system anymore If an antivirus existed it can not be installed to activate. The worm has won.
Daemon now controls every facet of the Supercomputer as her worms (the infected Guardians) begin spreading her Word throughout the internet.
In real life just like in ReBoot over 95% of the Net becomes infected only computers not Online are by some fluke not able to be infected are spared. Anytime a User managed to kill off one of the worms 2 more would appear during that time it took.This was a true Supervirus.Security protocols on machines were usless because this worm could bypass login authentication, copy itself onto the computer and then use its resourses to attack more machines. Spreading the "word" if you will.
By 11:28 - Quote from
http://world.std.com/~franl/worm.html: Peter Yee at NASA Ames Research Center posts a warning to the TCP-IP mailing list: "We are currently under attack from an Internet VIRUS.It has hit UC Berkeley, UC San Diego, Lawrence Livermore, Stanford, and NASA Ames." He suggests turning off telnet, ftp, finger, rsh and SMTP services.
By 12:34 A student at Harvard has found a way to slow the worm but he is unable to deliver his message to anyone because the Worm has gained control of the mail gateway at relay.cs.net and the Gateway has been shut down to restrict internet travel.In ReBoot this would be Matrix discovering that Bob holds the cure to Daemon's infection but he can't get anywhere because access to the net is now restricted.
At 2:54 A fix for the security hole the worm exploits finally reches the Net by bypassing major gateways and sending direct mail to system admins around the world.Systems finally begin to be sealed off from the Worm. (The Firewall shown in Daemon Rising's real life counterpart was simply a security patch that blocked the worm from getting in.)
Now this is where ReBoot seperates itself from the True story.Daemon was a logic bomb set to delete everything she infected luckilly the Morris worm did not have this feature, it could have but Morris's worm was an experimental worm that was made to prove a theory.It was released into the wild without a damaging payload attached to it.In the ReBoot world it escaped with this payload and the only way to spread the cure for the worm was with a benign virus carrying the security patch.
An interesting sidenote to this the security hole, the Worm exploted was a Daemon.The Time period the real life attack takes place in fits well with the ReBoot Time Scale as well.
