Comment Re: I have seen some malware trying to infect my M (Score 1) 172
Im not sure about MacOS9, i was off macs by then, but in System 7 days, DOS/Windows3.1/Win95 had tens of thousands of viruses, and Mac OS7 had literally about 7. I doubt it jumped that much in a couple years.
Windows (up until XP) still had a DOS core. It was SO easy to write a Windows virus, almost trivial. Macs on the other hand had no command shell, so everything needed to be system calls. Also, it was a new processor, Motorola 68K to Intel `86, so machine code was different. Then, byt the time MacOS 9 came around, im sure it was pretty much all PowerPC. From what i heard, it was almost impossible to write shellcode for it.
So, a huge influx of viruses for a hard to hack processor when the ease and profit was in the Windows arena? I doubt it.
Not saying that OS9 was great. It wasn't. Read the whole mess about Copeland and Taligent if you want to read about how NOT to run a company. But the virus problem wasn't the issue.