20 Years of Virii

DenOfEarth writes "News.com has an article outlining that it was around twenty years ago that a computer security reasearcher coined the term 'virus', and how the things have been running amok. Interestingly enough, when said researcher applyed for research funding to look into a blanket solution to this possible 'virus' problem, he was turned down."

Comments

not to nitpick

[mabu]

From dictonary.com:

Q. What is the plural of virus?
A. Viruses.
It is not viri, or (which is worse) virii. True, the word comes directly from Latin, but not all Latin words ending in -us have -i as their plural. Besides, viri is the Latin word for 'men' (plural of vir, man, the root the English virile). There is in fact no written attestation of a Latin plural of virus.

If you would like to pursue the subject further, see the excellent article What's the Plural of `Virus'? at Perl.com. If you have some knowledge of linguistics and Latin, you might be interested in the morphological analysis of the word from the Perseus Project.