The first call came late one winter night. A journalist working for a university magazine in Miami, Florida, wanted to know about a mischievous computer programme that was driving students crazy.
Most IBM personal computers ran on MS-DOS and data was stored on 5.25-inch floppy disks, which could store 160 kilobyte of files. It was on one such disk that Amjad had copied the ‘Brain Virus’ or, the Pakistani Brain, which became the first viral computer infestation the world had seen. The self-replicating virus that automatically copied onto the disks spread like wildfire.
Viral computer infestations jumped tenfold from 3,000 in the first two months of 1988 to around 30,000 in its last two months, a US-based software trade organisation noted at the time. But how did two Pakistanis from Lahore, famous for its food and hospitality, come up with the idea in the first place? How did a young man with no formal education in information technology and no mentor to guide him figure out a complex process to infiltrate computers undetected? When it’s time to have fun, most boys in Lahore head to their rooftops to fly kites. Others would go out to play Pakistan’s most popular sport, street-cricket.
In the 1970s it was a struggle to find electronic parts and even more difficult to get a hold of the right instruction manuals. That’s where the Alvi siblings were lucky. In his own words, Amjad was “always a third class student” and failed a calculus exam in college. The method he used to solve an integration problem didn’t go down well with his evaluator. It was not that he didn’t know the answer, he just did it in another way.
“Do you see what I mean by that? With limited resources in Pakistan where it’s difficult to get hold of components, if you had a computer and a bit of imagination, you can do anything."Love at first sight “That was my first computer. A good thing about it was that it was sold as a do-it-yourself kit. So you’d get to know the ins and outs of the computer,” says Amjad.
The availability of clones helped many people buy their first computers as they cost much less than branded machines, which were out of reach of many Pakistanis.
So he is responsible for creating Norton, Mcaffee and few other anti viruses brands.