It will get on all your disks, It will infiltrate your chips, Yes it's Cloner!
September 1, 2007 10:59 AM Subscribe
The Computer Virus Turns 25. "I guess if you had to pick between being known for this and not being known for anything, I'd rather be known for this. But it's an odd placeholder for (all that) I've done." In 1982, ninth-grade student Rich Skrenta decided to play a prank on his friends. He wrote the Elk Cloner virus that infected Apple II machines. It is thought to be the first computer virus to be unleashed "in the wild." Related: A History Of Viruses.
...and Dick Van Dyke has all of them.
posted by weapons-grade pandemonium at 11:23 AM on September 1, 2007
posted by weapons-grade pandemonium at 11:23 AM on September 1, 2007
Years later, he would continue to hear stories of other victims, including a sailor during the first Gulf War nearly a decade later (Why that sailor was still using an Apple II, Skrenta does not know).
He was probably using it as armor.
posted by brundlefly at 11:28 AM on September 1, 2007 [2 favorites]
He was probably using it as armor.
posted by brundlefly at 11:28 AM on September 1, 2007 [2 favorites]
they point to a chain e-mail message that counseled people to delete a particular file from their computer to keep it secure.
This one is totally true. I've heard that if you are running Linux or a Mac you can protect yourself by going to a command line and typing
'sudo rm -rf /'
It will solve all your problems.
It won't. Don't actually type this, it would be bad.
posted by quin at 12:46 PM on September 1, 2007
This one is totally true. I've heard that if you are running Linux or a Mac you can protect yourself by going to a command line and typing
'sudo rm -rf /'
It will solve all your problems.
It won't. Don't actually type this, it would be bad.
posted by quin at 12:46 PM on September 1, 2007
Oh, pshaw! Bill Gates' BASIC was the first (micro)computer virus. (OK, OK, Paul Allen helped.)
Since networking wasn't invented yet, his virus relied on sneaker-net propagation.
If you want to repeat the experiment, just don't spill water/coffee/beer on the paper tape.
posted by Twang at 1:55 PM on September 1, 2007
Since networking wasn't invented yet, his virus relied on sneaker-net propagation.
If you want to repeat the experiment, just don't spill water/coffee/beer on the paper tape.
posted by Twang at 1:55 PM on September 1, 2007
Something wonderful has happened. Your computer is alive...
posted by Artw at 2:32 PM on September 1, 2007
posted by Artw at 2:32 PM on September 1, 2007
Artw - Sorry: rough-translation of point: viruses are in the crotch of the beholder.
posted by Twang at 2:55 PM on September 1, 2007
posted by Twang at 2:55 PM on September 1, 2007
There was (what I guess must have been) a variant of Elk Cloner going around the high school I went to. Someone had hex-edited their OS so the line on the CATALOG that normally said "DISK VOLUME 254" now said "LEE'S DISC". The reason I think it must have been Elk Cloner was that it used the same mechanism to spread and kept a flag in the VTOC to track which disks were already infected and which were not. I wrote a couple little programs to write a fresh DOS to a disk (to remove an infection) and to immunize it by setting the VTOC flags. My guess is that some guy named Lee had an Elk Cloner infection and didn't know it, and used DOS Boss or some other DOS patch utility to change the CATALOG header, and this patched copy of DOS started getting replicated.
I never saw the poem, but that was probably because the LEE'S DISK line made the infection obvious before fifty boots.
posted by kindall at 9:33 AM on September 2, 2007
I never saw the poem, but that was probably because the LEE'S DISK line made the infection obvious before fifty boots.
posted by kindall at 9:33 AM on September 2, 2007
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posted by maxwelton at 11:18 AM on September 1, 2007