What was your first Anti-Virus/Antispyware program you can remember?

[ForgottenSeer 58943]

Just barely... I remember having a cheat-sheet of DOS commands... in those days, using a computer was not a good form of relaxation.

And my first browser (at work) was called Mosaic.

What do you mean computers weren't relaxing back then? They were incredibly relaxing and actually required a brain to use.. Hehe. Also, consequently, a lot of them were virtually unhackable because their code was exceedingly streamlined, and virtually nothing could interface remotely with any viable userspace elevations.

In this day and age of bloat, bad code, exploits, and well, about everything else, I find almost none of it relaxing and actually dislike most of it. I sort of miss the old days because of the simplicity of all of it.

 

[Burrito]

Since we are talking about relics.... in my first real job in the 1990s, I worked on the ARPANet.

ARPANet evolved into the....... internet.

And ARPANet was created by @ForgottenSeer 58943 and his pals in the military-intelligence industrial complex. And they have been spying on us ever since.

 

[blackice]

Since we are talking about relics.... in my first real job in the 1990s, I worked on the ARPANet.

ARPANet evolved into the....... internet.

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And ARPANet was created by @ForgottenSeer 58943 and his pals in the military-intelligence industrial complex. And they have been spying on us ever since.

And now my day has been made.

 

[ForgottenSeer 58943]

Meh, real old school is acoustic modem on a non-CRT unit that dumped everything to a daisy wheel printing CP/M running Fortran, and jacked into a PDP-8 and playing Colossal Cave.

Before ARPA became widespread there were BBS's, which posed a serious problem for intelligence gathering because they didn't have sufficient data interception on ATA v.32bis connections and everything required HUMINT. Spoofing your deeds by phreaking made it simplistic to avoid any potential problem.

Fidonet was a major communication method spreading information that they wanted, but had no idea how to contain or more specifically to inject disinfo. I have fond memories of running a phreak hub out of a spare bedroom in my apartment, and having a Fidonet hub while running a warez site. I knew Tom Jennings quite well and had a good time during those days in the underground. But I can't disclose much more without risking some level of revealing my identity.

Honestly, even today if you wanted some secure communication you could setup a v.32bis over encrypted VOIP, between two nodes running Wildcat and the spooks wouldn't even know what it is, or what to do with it.

 

[roger_m]

The first PC antivirus I used was McAfee for DOS. I quite possibly used NoVirus, on my Amiga, before then.

 

[Solarquest]

My first AV was Pc-Cillin, then Dr Solomon and Antiviraltoolkit ...used also Thunderbyte and F-prot to scan.

 

[mlnevese]

I'm seeing names of products in this thread I hadn't heard for years. Good to know I'm not the only ancient dinosaur in the forum

 

[Cortex]

There was a limited AV scanner with Win 3.x - It was useless of course but thinking back (not easy) the first main one I used was the Icelandic F-Prot & I loved it simplistic approach, I think it's still around as re-branded - I of course at some point used the old Norton which seemingly ended up with updaters to it's updaters to its updaters & ended up as a bloated blob (IMHO) I used NOD32 around that time too & was impressed - I used Prevx which I think was developed in Derby UK? near me which it's technology was used in Webroot eeeek- Malwarebyes to was part of my armory which when became 3.xx went down hill, I'm still using ESET which is the one enduring thread though impressed with the new Norton & Symantec

My first AV was Pc-Cillin, then Dr Solomon and Antiviraltoolkit ...used also Thunderbyte and F-prot to scan.

Forgot about Dr. Solomon & Pc-Cillin, I saved some really old PC mags going to root them out to look at the ads.

 

[kev216]

My first AV that I used was Panda Antivirus Pro. It was offered at the local computer shop because at that time, it was the lightest suite to run on our old windows XP machine. Used it for several years, then tried Norton, AVG, Sophos and several others.
Last year I switched back to the same Panda product which is now renamed to Panda Dome Essential. Still after all those years it is the security suite that runs the smoothest on both of my computers of all products I've tried.