
The Most Sophisticated Piece of Software Ever Written - techtor
https://zeroequalsfalse.com/posts/sophisticated-software-ever-written/
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ksaj
This is too much like when John McAfee et al ranted about how the Michelangelo
virus was turning the antivirus world upside down because of it's ultra
sophistication.

What they weren't saying though, was that Michelangelo was a STONED virus
clone with the "Your PC is now Stoned!!!" printing payload turned into simple
disk overwriting procedure (very common at the time), and the trigger was
changed to a particular date instead of a random once-a-week average odds.
It's worth noting there were already at least a dozen STONED variants by the
time MICH showed up on the scene. All of them were simple opcode changes just
to evade the existing scan strings. Not sophisticated.

In other words, Michelangelo wasn't the sophisticated world altering virus the
antivirus folks were ranting about at all. And while the trigger date was
about a birthday, it wasn't chosen because it was also Michelangelo's birthday
or whatever. It was hugely marketable for the antivirus companies when
promoted as such, though.

History repeats.

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Arnt
_THAT_ is the most sophisticated piece of software ever written? The
description sounds less complicated than the was the perl3 interpreter.

I've heard the google search engine contains >10 million... no, not lines of
code, _source files_. That might be the actual most sophisticated piece of
software. Perhaps?

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simonblack
There were reports that Stuxnet spuriously affected Siemens controllers in
countries all around the world. That smacks of over-simplicity, not
sophistication.

