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harmless. There are a number of variants of the bug, but most simply cause computers to play ‘Yankee Doodle’. This variant – known as Version 44 – played the tune at 5 p.m. every eight days.

The company arranged for specialist anti-virus software to be shipped overnight by Federal Express. The publishers of the software assured the Help Desk that they would simply need to run the specialist program on the computers to locate the infected files and kill the virus; the files wouldn’t be damaged and no data would be lost. Yankee Doodle was a nuisance, the company was assured, but not a problem.

On the Friday morning the technical support staff began the time-consuming task of checking every computer in the company. They discovered that eighteen of their machines had been hit by the virus; they also discovered that the killer function of the specialist software they had just bought wouldn’t work on their particular variant of Yankee Doodle. Instead, to clean the bug out, they would need to delete all infected files and replace them.

The virus they were fighting is generally transferred on diskette. It attaches itself to an executable file – a word-processing program or a game, for instance – then, once loaded on to a computer, searches out other programs to infect. It is generally harmless in that it never attacks data files – the ones users actually work on – so it can’t cause serious damage. Its nuisance value comes in eradicating it: deleting programs and then replacing them can be time consuming.

In the meantime, to stop the virus spreading any farther, the company decided to shut down the entire network of 1,500 computers, leaving machines and staff idle. The technical support specialists estimated that killing the bug and replacing the programs shouldn’t take them more than two or three hours, at the most. By mid-afternoon they realized that they had underestimated the size of the job, and arranged to come in over the weekend. In the end, the technical staff worked four days, Friday through to Monday, before they were satisfied that all the machines were free of the virus. During that time the computers and the staff were inactive, neither processing work nor getting ahead with anything else.

The computers worked well for the next three days. Then, at 10 a.m. on Thursday, 4 July, the virus was rediscovered. In a routine

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