Alas, John McAfee, We Hardly Knew Ye
Say what you will about John McAfee—and today, when news of his apparent suicide in a Barcelona jail seeped out, people said a lot —the 75 year old was a blast to cover.
From his first entrance onto the national stage in 1992, as the human face of the novel computer virus known as Michelangelo , he generated all the excitement and flimflam of the Music Man. Never mind that the Michelangelo Virus turned out to be a hypefest—McAfee was able to capitalize on it big time. The worldwide hysteria he provoked helped him launch an antivirus software company that, when he sold it a scant few years later, made him $100 million.
The whispers around McAfee in those early days—never proven, of course—were that he worked with labs to create some of those viruses. That was probably industry jealousy: his software was the very first to catch whatever new, obscure computer bug found its way onto a personal computer.
"People kept saying I hyped this, I hyped this," McAfee complained to me in 1992 , shortly after the Michelangelo Virus turned out to be fake news. "I never contacted the press—they called me."
