If you’re old enough to have worked on computers in the early 90s, today is a special day.

Michelangelo was probably the first, globally (mis)reported viruses, which was set to activate today, March 6th.

TV and cable were still the form of news for most, and once “Big Television” picked up on this fairly benign thing (It’d make your life difficult, but unlike most nasty viruses, it only wiped your partition table, but didn’t destroy your data- unlike everything else since).

Norton, , and many others dogpiled onto this, offering a free AV tool to remove Michelangelo for some free press. You couldn’t go ANYWHERE to get away from hearing about it. John McAffee said something similar to 5 million computers would be infected (and most users devastated) by it. In the end, it ended up being a couple thousand.

Much like the Y2K bug, there was plenty of press, incredible misinformation, and far, far too much hype.