Computer viruses are increasingly terrifying, with the capacity to destabilise entire nation states.
But for some reason, they seemed much more terrifying when they weren't able to do much more than corrupt your Elite save game.
This old clip of a 1988 news report, brought to our attention again by Reddit, illustrates just how scary and baffling the digital common cold really was 25 years ago.
It's full of hysterical commentary, random illustrative images of games and motherboards, and is an extremely entertaining watch. Until you realise that the worst fears of our most pessimistic futurists have now basically now come true. Sigh.