by DJ Neawedde | 12th July 2007

Yay! What we know as the “computer virus” is now 25 years old. It all started in 1981 with an Apple II and 9th-grader named Richard Skrenta. He began by tricking his friends with pirated games they’d play. “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.” says Skrenta. An interesting beginning to the problem child of our modern digital age.

After Skenta’s friends banned him from their computers, he started infecting the school computers. Rigging it so the program could copy itself onto floppy disks the students used on the system. And that’s how ‘Elk Cloner’ came to be, the world’s first actual computer virus to spread itself. It wasn’t a mean virus, just popped a funny message up on the screen. Read [Machinist]

by DJ Neawedde | 12th July 2007

Yay! What we know as the “computer virus” is now 25 years old. It all started in 1981 with an Apple II and 9th-grader named Richard Skrenta. He began by tricking his friends with pirated games they’d play. “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.” says Skrenta. An interesting beginning to the problem child of our modern digital age.

After Skenta’s friends banned him from their computers, he started infecting the school computers. Rigging it so the program could copy itself onto floppy disks the students used on the system. And that’s how ‘Elk Cloner’ came to be, the world’s first actual computer virus to spread itself. It wasn’t a mean virus, just popped a funny message up on the screen. Read [Machinist]