Before BitTorrent, Limewire and Napster piracy had a different form, and that form was the floppy disk; first actual floppy disks (8 inch then later 5 1/4 inch), then later the not so floppy 3 1/2 inch disk.

Back in the 1980’s and well into the 1990’s, if you wanted to pirate software you obtained a copy of a software from a friend, and you then copied that software onto your own blank floppy disk; it may seem archaic in the age of online downloads, but it was widespread.

What many may forget about that first golden age of software piracy though, is that it was also the early days of the computer virus. But one group hasn’t forgotten.

The Internet Archive has launched The Malware Museum, a collection of malware programs, usually viruses, that were distributed in the 1980s and 1990s on home computers.

As the museum explains, once viruses infected a system they would sometimes show animation or messages that you had been infected, although they rarely caused any damage and were usually more of an annoyance, be it one that would then spread itself, either when you made a copy of the infected disk, or via the computer itself.

The good news is that while the Museum demonstrates the viruses via emulators, any destructive routines within the viruses have been removed so you’ll get the full experience without an added infection.

Collection

According to The Christian Science Monitor, most of the museum’s viruses come from the personal collection of Mikko Hyppönen, the Chief Research Officer at antivirus company F-Secure.

Hyppönen is said to have been collecting malware since 1991, and still has many early viruses in their original format, contained on five-and-a-quarter-inch floppy disks while others (particularly the 1980’s collection) were gathered by Jason Scott, a digital archivist and curator of the Internet Archive’s software collections.

The value of such a collection could perhaps be argued, in that their display doesn’t really do much, but likewise, history should be preserved. It is the goal of the Internet Archive to provide permanent access for researchers, historians, scholars, people with disabilities, and the general public to historical collections that exist in digital format.

It’s also a stroll down memory lane for those (really Generation X and older) who can remember those days; I can still remember the first computer virus I ever had in roughly the late 1980’s on an IBM XT clone with EGA monitor, twin 5 1/4 inch floppy drives and a 10mb hard drive: it was the marijuana virus and all it did was tell me my computer was stoned.

If you’re looking for a trip down memory lane, the full early malware experience can be viewed on the Internet Archive here.

Image credit: unknown author/Internet Archive