20th Anniversary Of Computer Viruses Commemorated

DoraLives writes "Our good friends at the BBC are celebrating the 20th anniversary of the computer virus. So, viruses are no longer teenagers and are now entering adulthood, as 'there are almost 60,000 viruses in existence and they have gone from being a nuisance to a permanent menace.' What wonders shall there be to come, as these marvelous bits of code continue to grow and multiply?" We ran a recent BBC-authored story on the psychology of virus writers.

Comments

Wrong anniversary, this is their 21st.

[plover]

I remember an article in Scientific American that spoke to a young man named Richard Skrenta, who wrote an Apple ][ virus in 1982. I remember him bemoaning the fact that "it got onto his disks, the math teacher's disks and all his friends disks."

Sorry, but Fred Cohen was not the first virus writer.

These viruses can already drink, and they can probably vote on a Diebold machine. They may already have...

Worms are TWENTY-FIVE years old...

[alispguru]

Don't know about viruses, but the first computer worms (as in programs that dynamically spread themselves across networks) were created at Xerox PARC in 1978. See here (scroll down to "1978") or here for details.