25th Anniversary of First Computer Virus

Attended a teleconference this morning about the future of email and communication technology, held by Ferris Research, and learned that this year marks the 25th Anniversary of the very first computer virus ever to appear.

As Wikipedia indicates, it was a program called "Elk Cloner," and spread via the floppy disk (remember the floppy disk?). Jeez, wasn't the first floppy about the size of a 33 1/3 record, so when you were carrying records around, you really new you were holding onto something. The first virus, written by Rich Skrenta, was written for the Apple DOS 3.3. It was originally intended as a joke, and was embedded into a game, and once the game was set to play the 50th time, instead of the game a blank screen would appear with a poem about the virus Elk Cloner.

On that same note, the first PC virus was a boot sector virus called "Brain," created by two brothers, Basit and Amjad Farooq Alvi, who lived in Lahore, Pakistan. Brain was written to detect pirated copies of software they had written.

Doesn't that now just sound like ancient history, when viruses merely spread mostly through portable media like floppy disks?

Sometimes, when thinking and writing about viruses and all the trouble they create, I think back to the show "Get Smart." I remember at one point, Maxwell Smart had Kaos, the bad guys, totally cornered, and finally, at long last, with one fell swoop could totally destroy them. But then Max realizes, without Kaos, he wouldn't have a job, so he let them go (or, in his distracted state, they escaped, I forget which). So Kaos survived to continue their lifelong battle with Control.

So as I rev up everyday to fight spam and viruses for Message Partners, I sometimes wonder what I would do if they weren't around? But I guess with anything, where there is control, there is always Kaos close by.