Maltese Amoeba is a destructive, fast infecting polymorphic virus which overwrites the first four sectors of tracks 0 to 29 of the hard disk and any diskette in the disk drive, if the date is 1st November or 15th March of any year. A psychedelic screen effect follows.
When the machine is powered up, a fragment of a poem (The Auguries of Innocence) by William Blake (1745-1827) appears on the screen and the machine hangs. One of the lines displayed is 'To see a world in a grain of sand'.