About the Museum

I started collecting viruses when I was a kid. Binders of floppies, lists of names copied out of BBS posts, little virus sites on Geocities when Geocities was still a thing. Most of them were harmless. Some were beautiful. A few wrecked a computer or two when I was careless with them, and those memories are sharper than any of the ones that worked out fine.

This museum is a record of what those viruses looked like, who made them, and why they mattered. It is not a malware distribution site. It does not host executable virus code. It does not let you run anything. It is a catalog of images, stories, and technical history about a specific and underappreciated chapter of computing culture that ran roughly from 1986 through the end of the DOS era.

The people who wrote these viruses were, mostly, teenagers. Many of them were also making demoscene intros, cracking games, writing for underground zines like 40Hex and Phalcon/Skism, and teaching each other assembly language in BBS chat rooms. A lot of them grew up to be security researchers, game developers, and musicians. The line between virus authorship, demoscene art, and electronic music in that era is almost invisible. The Spanska virus from 1997 is as visually accomplished as most contemporary demos. The Yankee Doodle virus plays a recognizable tune. The Walker pixel sprite is charming graphic design.

We are not here to romanticize destructive software. Some of these viruses caused real harm and we document that honestly. We are here to preserve the cultural artifact of a specific moment in computing, written in the voice of someone who lived it.

All visual material comes from public educational archives including the Internet Archive Malware Museum, Virus Bulletin historical writeups, F-PROT archives, academic security research repositories, and scene documentation like the 40Hex zine archives. Source citations appear on every specimen page. Corrections, additions, and missing context are welcome: see our submissions page.

The DOS Virus Museum is an editorial project of phreak.fm. It holds no executables. It asks nothing of your computer. It exists as a museum.

~ the_curator