IBM warns that it may have passed a nasty little MS-DOS virus, dubbed Virus 1704 to 100 customers who attended a course last year at its education centre at La Hulpe outside Brussels: the virus may have been contracted from one of the MS-DOS micros used at the centre and could infect customer’s computers by attaching itself to COM files and incrementing them by 1,704 bytes, thereby producing a screen filled up haphazardly with random numbers; because this screen-filling does not always occur customers may be unaware that they have the virus and so IBM, in letters sent out to the potentially infected, advises the testing and quarantining of disks and machines, but so far no one in the UK has admitted to the highly contagious problem.
