I also used FPROT then., and Mcafee Virusscan for a while, when it wasn't terrible. Michelangelo was very averted.

Sneakernet boot sector'd viruses were very real 🙁

One thing I distinctly remember about early virus scanning software is that the good ones would actually let you browse their database of known viruses and get detailed information about what they were capable of... back when there were only a few hundred instead of a few hundred-thousand. :P

Yeah FPROT had a neat database that described explicitly for many of what its known viruses could do.

People used Norton.

Thunderbyte antivirus, now fprot because it has the most recent database afaik

keropi wrote:

Thunderbyte antivirus, now fprot because it has the most recent database afaik

Exactly, for pure dos to my knowledge f-prot has the most recent virus database. Not being a bad antivirus also makes it the best option in my opinion.
Back then and before windows 95 era people were obsessed with mcafee viruscan and it's vshield.

Back then I used Norton - the days when Norton software didn't equal bloatware

Think it was IBM Antivirus that came preinstalled with the PC. I just remember the weekly scan taking ages.
Think I got rid of it after a while, moved up to Win95 within 12 months of owning the PC anyway (and going online took another year)

Don't forget about the very, useless MSAV! 😵

Dr Solomon's I believe. Never got a virus but did enjoy reading the database. Some of the text mode viruses were cool, e.g. Cascade.

F-Prot was the most popular. Mcaffe was also quite popular, although not as much as F-Prot, since probably F-Prot had a user interface and Mcaffe Viruscan was command line.

Dominus wrote:

Back then I used Norton - the days when Norton software didn't equal bloatware

This one 486 I once had had an install of Norton Antivirus left behind by the previous owner. It made Win3.1 games unbearably slow, and its "inoculation" feature tended to corrupt a lot of my DOS games. 🤣 I left it on there for a long time because I honestly thought I needed it, but I eventually got rid of it when I realized how rare DOS viruses truly were in the 2000s.

I ran F-Prot 3.16f on my DOSbox tree and was disappointed not to find any infections. You have to run it with the /NOFLOPPY /OLD parameters or it will refuse to run.

Dominus wrote:

Back then I used Norton - the days when Norton software didn't equal bloatware

Yep. There was a time when Norton was considered to be quite good at what they did.

And then came Symantec the BS crapware, bloatware, scamware called "systemworks" and it all quickly went into the toilet.

I still use the old original version Norton utilities on my Windows 95, DOS rigs. Got a complete boxed version that had the first Windows 95 package along with the DOS package.

No real need for anti-virus though on my retro stuff, since all of my retro machines are not connected to the web and anything that touches them is thoroughly vetted by me first.

We had one from a company called Leprechaun Software called Virus Buster. I remember it being quite fast and I could be wrong, but maybe it had a TSR for intercepting boot sector viruses on floppies..? I think?

I do remember that its UI was what got me in to ASCII art, though! 😜

What is the latest free/abandon virus-scan for Dos?
What is the best Version when using a 286/10?

dr.zeissler wrote:

What is the latest free/abandon virus-scan for Dos?
What is the best Version when using a 286/10?

Is this a question arising from mere historical curiosity or you actually don't have a better computer where to run a decent AV that could scan the files before they're transferred to the DOS drive?

An outdated database-only AV is as useless a thing as it can possibly be, and commercial 286-era AV's, as far as I remember, were not advanced enough to perform proper heuristic analysis, let alone with sufficient speed.

ESET still offers an up-to-date DOS version of NOD32, by far the most powerful AV in existence, only rivaled by Kaspersky, specifically in the "cleansing" department, not detection.

Problem is, it will cost you money and you can forget about running it on a 286.

Well, one thing to keep in mind is that most DOS era viruses can't infect Windows executables and vice versa.

NOD32 won't run on 286 anyway. (hint: that 32 part implies 386 minimum)