**Ted** -- thanks, fixed that date error at [1] and noted at [2]. Doh, I knew that.

**John** -- the benign / invisible virus is an interesting meme. I'm getting up a soap order at Powell's, may add "Computer One" to it.

As for the beneficial virus / symbiont: they can run amok too, as well as can the purely evil virii. The best example in fiction I know of is Niven and Pournelle's "The Mote in God's Eye." The Watchmakers were like elves -- spacefarers would leave things outside their door while sleeping and in the morning would find them "magically" improved. Unfortunately the Watchmakers multiplied like crazy and if left unchecked could destroy the most disciplined and battle-hardened spaceship. The solution: periodically suit everyone up and open all the airlocks (before this crop of Watchmakers had gotten sufficiently advanced to develop little bitty spacesuits...).

I heard that at MIT in the early days of Project Athena, the hacker undergrads who were given some privs on the network were referred to as Watchmakers. Guess it was graduation that effected the opening of the airlocks...

[1] http://tbtf.com/archive/2000-07-20.html#s07
[2] http://tbtf.com/emendations.html