Check me out. I’m on a roll, a post a day, almost!. Anyway, the other night one of my old contacts, from a good thirty years ago pointed me to a site he’d found on line that had archived all our old demos from the Amiga days! OK, I’d better explain myself. Circa 1985 me and a friend called Cosy set up an Amiga demo group call ‘Magnetic Fields’ with a guy from Rotherham who’s nickname was ‘No.5’. Yes, that was the main character from the film Short Circuit. I’ll leave the real names out to protect the guilty!
So, there we were with our A500’s Hacking cracking and packing anything that moved. I think Cosy may have been single handedly responsible for the downfall of commodore, but that’s another story. I was much more interested in coding stuff, and even though I’d had published products out from the tender age of 12 (on the vic20) this was where we really got to cut our teeth. 
Decent graphics hardware and a nice fast 68000 CPU running at a whopping 8mhz! We had demos coming out of our butts. I was responsible for a few of the early MF demos which are all on that site! It’s amazing to look back at what a 16 year old kid was up to cracking out 3d demos using the hardware blitter to draw lines, render sprites, and i was also responsible for one of the most famous ( or notorious depending on your point of view) virus killers at the time – Interferon.
Interferon worked by hooking all the IRQ’s to replace its boot code
so that in the event of any virus ( or a competing boot loader) stepped in, Interferon would immediately heal itself, and survive the reboot. One trick Interferon had up its sleeve was that it also
replaced all the IRQ’s on the vertical blanking interrupt, which ensured that all those vectors we replaced 50 times a second! Nothing was getting past that sucker.
Funny thing was, the most successful virus killer on the Amiga was written in 1K of assembler. 1024 bytes. Whilst all this hackery pokery was great fun it did do one thing that changed my life, I got me into the games industry, where I stayed for a further 23 years.
I wouldn’t change a thing.