Steve Chang has a fondness for viruses. It's not as ghoulish as it sounds; he's obsessed with the computer variety, not the human kind. Fortunately for him -- unfortunately for us -- there are a lot out there.

In his Taipei office, Chang has collected a substantial portion of the 18,000 or so viruses infecting computers around the world. In 1990, there were only 183; that number had grown to 13,000 by 1997 and Chang believes that five or six new specimens are now being created daily.

Chang took some time the other day to paint for me a grim picture of online microbes. He estimates that about 98 percent of desktop computers have viruses. What is amazing is that despite growing awareness of the damage they can do, they continue to spread, and the virus infection rates keep rising.