yeah, there definitely were hardware viruses, stepping the drive out of its maximum cylinder was one... I remember there were even hard drives that didn't have a physical stop, so the head just dropped down on the platter at some point. But to exploit that you had to make sure that you are running on the exact (vulnerable) disk drive model, which was already very unlikely.
I also heard stories of programming graphics card registers in a fancy way to trigger high frequencies in the CRT coils that could, again if the CRT was vulnerable, potentially destroy the coil. But this also relied on very specific hardware to pull it off.
A generic attack on such a high volume home computer or floppy drive like the C1541 would definitely have made the rounds back then in the computer magazines.
And the myth that developers deliberately put in code to damage or even destroy the pirates' computers can also be ruled out almost entirely, as (at least in europe) even back then there was a strong legal protection against deliberately damaging other people's property. I distinctly remember reading about this being debunked in the largest German C64 magazine (64'er) by a lawyer....
I also heard stories of programming graphics card registers in a fancy way to trigger high frequencies in the CRT coils that could, again if the CRT was vulnerable, potentially destroy the coil. But this also relied on very specific hardware to pull it off.
A generic attack on such a high volume home computer or floppy drive like the C1541 would definitely have made the rounds back then in the computer magazines.
And the myth that developers deliberately put in code to damage or even destroy the pirates' computers can also be ruled out almost entirely, as (at least in europe) even back then there was a strong legal protection against deliberately damaging other people's property. I distinctly remember reading about this being debunked in the largest German C64 magazine (64'er) by a lawyer....