Not long ago, a unique museum of old computer viruses was opened the Internet, The Verge writes.

Modern malware is designed to not to arouse suspicion. But it hasn't always been this way. Rather than hijack them, the creators of the viruses of the past often set out to destroy computers, and trumpeted their activities with garish splash screens, showing scrambled code, animated pot leaves, or laughing skulls.

The vast majority of these viruses are gone now, the security holes they exploited patched out of existence by Microsoft or by the inexorable march of time making the very machines they worked on obsolete, but a new Malware Museum is an online collection put together by Mikko Hyppönen from a Finnish security firm F-secure, featuring emulated versions of a number of MS-DOS viruses from the 1980s and 1990s.

Visitors can download defanged versions of the viruses in question, each of which has had the destructive bit of code at its core removed, leaving only the visual effects.

bbabo.Net