A childhood belief about technology

When I was eight, I first heard about computer viruses and I thought that a virus on a computer was a disease like a common cold in humans. It was the early nineties and we owned an Amiga Commodore; probably the best computer available in those days where the computer programs came on 3 1/2 inch floppy disks. My dad then told me that if you put a floppy disk on write-protected, you will prevent any viruses from getting on the disk, but I did not realize that write-protecting a disk prevents you from saving any files on it. I then thought that if you had a cold and you coughed or sneezed onto a floppy disk that is on write-enabled, you might give the disk a virus. The fact that I saw two Captain Planet episodes where Dr Blight's computer Mal caught a computer virus on the end of two episodes and was sneezing and coughing made me more firmly believe that computer viruses were like diseases in humans. It wasn't until I was sixteen that I realized that computer viruses are programs that are capable of reproducing themselves, deleting files and making unwanted copies of files on a computer to really slow it down.