One day in December 1989, Eddy Willems got a floppy disk that changed his life. His boss gave it to him after finding the label intriguing: “AIDS Version 2.0,” a disease that was new and strange at that time. The company, based in Antwerp, Belgium, sold medical insurance among other things, and some AIDS statistics might prove lucrative, the boss thought. So, he asked the 27-year-old Willems to test the software.

A jack-of-all-tech-trades, Willems put the 5.25-inch black plastic diskette into his PC. He ran the program, filling out a whole survey meant to tell if someone could be infected with AIDS or not. “And that was it,” Willems says.