For a brief moment in the 1992 U.S. Presidential race, a story more important than Clinton, Bush, et al. appeared. An imminent and dire threat to the nation’s computer network was at hand, and newspapers around the country ran headlines warning of impending disaster. “Thousands of PCs could crash Friday,” ran the headline of USA Today. “Deadly Virus Set to Wreak Havoc Tomorrow,” said the Washington Post. “Paint It Scary,” said the Los Angeles Times, in an article they intended to actually help the personal computer. The culprit was a computer virus called “Michelangelo” by its creators, set to strike on its namesake’s birthday.

On this day, March 6, in 1992, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of computers supposedly infected with the dormant Michelangelo virus were to be put out of service when it awoke. The actual events were more a whimper than a bang.

The worst that happened that day was a series of coincidental glitches that shut down 1,500 east-coast ATMs and three quarters of New Jersey’s lottery machines for a time. None of them were due to Michelangelo in the least. Scattered accounts of computer users experiencing trouble came in, but the “5 million computers infected” number raised by MacAffee anti-virus developers and batted around in the media turned out to be vastly overstated.