Computer virus history

There isn’t anyone who hasn’t heard of computer viruses. Except maybe people who doesn’t know a computer, but this is a minority. Well, maybe the people who use Linux ( :p ), and you can’t blame them ;-). I have noticed people don’t know anything about the history of viruses, and computers in general. This is actually really interesting, it is even not more than 50 years ago.

Maybe some of that later, but let’s go on now to the first computer virus. There might be some discussion about it, that’s completely normal, it depends where you see the boundary line for a virus program. If I’m completely wrong, you may tell me; actually, you have to tell me.

For me, the first real virus was ‘Elk Cloner’ written by Rich Skrenta in 1982. Rich was 15 years old, a high school student. It was the first virus that has spread ‘in the wild’, and it infected the Apple operating system. The virus infected a floppy disk, and this is also the way it was spread. The good news is it didn’t harm your computer.

The people then hasn’t heard about computer viruses, so they weren’t aware about it. Just like there weren’t any virus scanners and/or firewalls.

An interesting fact is that the virus is made due to annoyance. Rich wrote little games, which stopped after you played it like 50 times. He gave this to his friends. It’s really frustrating, when you begin to like the game, you can even say they already where addicted, the game stopped. So his friends learned not to trust Rich his programs. This is why he wrote his virus, now he could annoy his friends without their knowing.

Oh yeah, it even had a little poem on every 50^th booting:

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!

 

So far the first computer virus …