In the old days of the Mac, back in the 1980s and 1990s, the suggestion that they were immune to computer viruses would have been laughed at. It wasn’t nearly as bad as on the Windows platform, but you definitely needed to run antivirus software. I learned that lesson the hard way in the late […]

It all started for me back in 1989. I bought some software from a local computer shop in Edison, New Jersey known as Egghead Software. The possibility of a virus didn’t occur to me. That was a problem others confronted; it rarely happened on Macs. But things went bad real fast, and I soon realized […]

Apple’s marketing people might have put themselves on a shaky footing when they downplayed the susceptibility of OS X to malware in those Mac versus PC ads. While pointing to over 120,000 viruses on the Windows platform, the ads used the phrase (to quote approximately), “but not on Macs.” But that statement was strategically weasel-worded. It […]

Back in the early days, Mac users confronted a moderate level of malware infections. I remember one occasion when I visited a local software store — back in Edison, New Jersey — and bought a screen saver from a reputable publisher. The floppy was infected, however. I didn’t have anti-virus software at hand, and had […]