Computer ‘Virus’ Is Born 26 Years Ago Today

Wired via HardOCP ^ | # November 9, 2009 | # 8:00 pm | Kim Zetter

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

HardOCP Linked

*****************************

Nov. 10, 1983: Computer ‘Virus’ Is Born. Tech Gone Bad 1983: Fred Cohen, a University of Southern California graduate student, gives a prescient peek at the digital future when he demonstrates a computer virus during a security seminar at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania. A quarter-century later, computer viruses have become a pandemic for which there’s no inoculation.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

fyi

[Pessimist]

Yeah.

Remember when the means of infection was a 5-1/4 floppy?

I feel old...

[JoeProBono]

[HuntsvilleTxVeteran]

The roots of the modern computer virus go back to 1949,
when computer pioneer John von Neumann presented a paper
on the “Theory and Organization of Complicated Automata,”
in which he postulated that a computer program could
reproduce.
Bell Labs employees gave life to von Neumann’s theory in
the 1950s in a game they called “Core Wars.”
In this game, two programmers would unleash software “organisms” and watch as they vied for control
of the computer.
***
In the seventies, I keyed in a program called life that
took over all of the computer memory.
Most failed and crashed the computer.
When this happened, you had to key in a bootstrap program.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

LOL....I suspect you might have started with computers before I did...