Otis Driftwood
07-13-2007, 12:36 PM
...are 25 years old today!
The computer virus conception story begins in 1981, when a tech-savvy 9th grader named Richard Skrenta got an Apple II for Christmas. Over the following few months he began cooking up ways to trick his friends using the machine. "I had been playing jokes on schoolmates by altering copies of pirated games to self-destruct after a number of plays," Skrenta once told the tech news site Security Focus. "I'd give out a new game, they'd get hooked, but then the game would stop working with a snickering comment from me on the screen."
When his friends realized his tricky ways, they banned Skrenta from their machines. And that's when he had an epiphany: He could put his code on the school's computer, and rig it to copy itself onto floppy disks that students used on the system. Thus was born Elk Cloner, the world's first computer virus to spread in the wild. The virus didn't do much damage; it infected the Apple II's OS and copied itself to other floppies, and every so often would display a tittering message on the screen:
Elk Cloner: The program with a personality
It will get on all your disks
It will infiltrate your chips
Yes it's Cloner!
It will stick to you like glue
It will modify RAM too
Send in the Cloner!
:D
I had a couple of nasty ones back in the day on the good old Amiga. Stuff that stayed in the memory, melting screens with canned laughter, the works. Even as a 13 year old they were made short work off with the reliable "Install" dos command. Everybody back then seemed to know it 'cause it was in all the monthly game mags.
Cut ahead a few years (I think ten). Running my first anti-virus software on my first PC I was surprised that it was infested to the gills with viruses, none of which did shit to make themselves recognizable. Maybe 'cause I wasn't on the net or something. Nowadays it seems to be mostly Spyware, Search & Destroy is tasked to update and immunize my PC per schedule. Plus those funky worms, which are in fact older than viruses (what a funny plural).
http://snowplow.org/tom/worm/history.html
Any of you been infected and screwed over by them thingies?
The computer virus conception story begins in 1981, when a tech-savvy 9th grader named Richard Skrenta got an Apple II for Christmas. Over the following few months he began cooking up ways to trick his friends using the machine. "I had been playing jokes on schoolmates by altering copies of pirated games to self-destruct after a number of plays," Skrenta once told the tech news site Security Focus. "I'd give out a new game, they'd get hooked, but then the game would stop working with a snickering comment from me on the screen."
When his friends realized his tricky ways, they banned Skrenta from their machines. And that's when he had an epiphany: He could put his code on the school's computer, and rig it to copy itself onto floppy disks that students used on the system. Thus was born Elk Cloner, the world's first computer virus to spread in the wild. The virus didn't do much damage; it infected the Apple II's OS and copied itself to other floppies, and every so often would display a tittering message on the screen:
Elk Cloner: The program with a personality
It will get on all your disks
It will infiltrate your chips
Yes it's Cloner!
It will stick to you like glue
It will modify RAM too
Send in the Cloner!
:D
I had a couple of nasty ones back in the day on the good old Amiga. Stuff that stayed in the memory, melting screens with canned laughter, the works. Even as a 13 year old they were made short work off with the reliable "Install" dos command. Everybody back then seemed to know it 'cause it was in all the monthly game mags.
Cut ahead a few years (I think ten). Running my first anti-virus software on my first PC I was surprised that it was infested to the gills with viruses, none of which did shit to make themselves recognizable. Maybe 'cause I wasn't on the net or something. Nowadays it seems to be mostly Spyware, Search & Destroy is tasked to update and immunize my PC per schedule. Plus those funky worms, which are in fact older than viruses (what a funny plural).
http://snowplow.org/tom/worm/history.html
Any of you been infected and screwed over by them thingies?