Maximum Information Systems, Inc. was founded in February of 1989. Since that time it's mission has been to provide unparalleled expertise in providing technological solutions to business problems. Specializing in Financial and Trading applications, M.I.S. has provided it clients with many solutions, some of which include the production of a Limited Partnership back office & tax reporting system. In addition to providing the client with full back office functionality, this system has produced over 1000,000 K-1 partnership returns for over 90,000 limited partners in over 15 investment limited partnerships per year. Another notable system developed for a major wall street firm is a trading system that trades between six hundred million to over one billion dollars in equity trades per day. The system also assists in fixed income trades that typically exceeds five hundred million dollars in trades per day. These trades are executed into more than 90,000 customer accounts. M.I.S. employees between three and six highly trained specialists who are both experts in the technology as well as the field of application. It is this mixture that enables the success of the company.

What is a virus? I was asked once, by a very intelligent person at a client's office, if she should avoid her computer because she was sick & didn't want to give it a virus. It occurs to me that many people don't really know what a computer virus is. I like to refer to computer viruses as today's version of a kid throwing a rock through a window. It is an act of destruction and nothing more. A virus is a program that was written to do damage. The most common damage is to delete files on your hard drive or to delete critical boot information off of your c-drive or destroy it's table of contents. For a program to be written to delete files is not uncommon. Chances are that your Internet browser will delete unneeded files after they have not been used for a set amount of time. This is as it should be. But suppose someone wrote a program
to delete critical, needed files. This is the "rock going through the window". Now the author of this program would try to make his program "stealthy". Because if he didn't we would see it & delete it before it would do any damage. The next step in creating a virus is to make it copy itself so that the author can smash as many windows as possible. To enable it to spread before damaging your system, it usually will wait for some event before it does it's damage. This can be a date, or some action taken by the user. It is these attributes that prompted the press to glorify these programs with the term "computer virus". It does damage, it replicates itself & it is hard to detect. Because the virus is a program, it must be executed to do it's damage. Therefore, sound files (*.wav & *.mid) cannot be "infected". Neither can picture or graphic files (*.gif, *.jpg and many others). Only programs (and to a lesser extent word processing and spreadsheet files, through the self contained macros, can contain a computer virus. These include COM, EXE & DLL files. How can you protect yourself from these programs? The only sure fire way would be to not use the Internet and never add files to your system. Because this is impractical, everyone should have & use a good anti-virus program. For Windows 95, my preference is Dr. Solomon's and Norton's (for windows 3.x, I prefer Macafee & Norton). I use them both with good success. A good program will guard on several fronts. It should scan your boot sectors at startup. It should also scan for memory resident viruses. It should monitor disk usage & not allow any suspicious activity, such as modifying the boot sector or other critical areas of the disk. Lastly, it should provide the ability to scan your disk. the scan can work in two ways. It can look for patterns that identify the virus (these patterns are called signatures), and/or it can remember the looks of all your programs & watch for changes between scans. Usually both methods are preferred so that new viruses who's signature is not known, may be detected. If you have one of these programs, perform the scans regularly (daily or weekly), allow the program to do all of it's functions (do not disable any operations), then you should be reasonably protected. If you still find yourself victim of a virus, then you should have "rescue" disks to correct the damage. Oh, one more point, there has not ever been, nor will there be a virus written that can damage the circuits or chips of your PC. Only your disk or your drivers (which reside on your disk) can be damaged. In other words, besides loss of data, no permanent damage from a virus can occur.

What is the Internet? The Internet is exactly what the name implies. It is a vehicle to interconnect networks. In 1969, the Department of Defense funded a project that would enable different networks & different types of networks to talk to each other. The results is the Internet. The connectivity of the Internet was enabled by equipment called routers (similar to special purpose PC's). The routers route the messages from LANs & WANs to talk across the Internet via TCP/IP, a special protocol developed to enable the inter-connectivity. The key to making the Internet work is the IP addresses that are utilized. Today, there are over 5 million servers on the Internet. The number of users is almost impossible to count. The advantages of the Internet was, at first, the free transfer of information from network to network. Then, electronic mail became the next frontier. Following e-mail, newsgroups were the real source of the Internet information. Newsgroups are like e-mail with no specific delivery. As you enter a newsgroup, everyone accesses the same "inbox". A user can post messages to the newsgroup containing whatever information he or she wishes. There are thousands of newsgroups on the Internet with millions of messages containing a wealth of information. The fastest growing segment of the Internet today is the World Wide Web. this graphical service has greatly accelerated the acceptance of the Internet. Users are attracted to the WWW because it is easy to use, interactive, informative and entertaining.

Maximum Information Systems, Inc