The Computer Virus Turns 25 in July

bl8n8r writes "In July of 1982, an infected Apple II propogated the first computer virus onto a 5-1/4" floppy. The virus, which did little more than annoy the user, Elk Cloner, was authored in Pittsburgh by a 15-year-old high school student, Rich Skrenta. The virus replicated by monitoring floppy disk activity and writing itself to the floppy when it was accessed. Skrenta describes the virus as "It was a practical joke combined with a hack. A wonderful hack." Remember, he was a 9th grader when he did this."

Imagine his wealth...

[dada21]

...if he had patented the virus.

McAfee

[JeanBaptiste]

Probably was McAfee. Which was a fantastic scanner at the time. Oh how things have changed since then. Sad to see both McAfee and Norton/Symantec turn into useless piles of garbage considering what they once were...

Re:Script kiddie age?

[fermion]

I suppose I will be pedantic about this as I don't think we should minimize the creativity. I think of script kiddies as someone who takes existing tool, say some published code and MS Visual studio, and repackages it. They, in fact, just use scripts.

What this kid did was go into the the Apple internals and figure out how to do something himself. In hindsight it was not such a great feat, but is was a feat that was at least somewhat novel.

OTOH, kids have nothing but time on their hands and if the parents and schools don't keep them busy, then they find other ways to stay busy. The more cleaver one can produce some real havoc. What impresses me is the high school kid that does something creative and interesting with his or her free time, instead of being randomly malicious. The really good ones will go out and start applying their skills to the betterment of humanity, but really any bright kid that chooses a path that is not gratuitously destructive is a win in my opinion.

Re:Script kiddie age?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is there any information on the average age of people who have written the major viruses of the last couple decades? Has this age gone down over time?

Old days one should know lots of math (polymorphic), asm development (to keep size low), great insight to how OS works (so os won't crash) to code a working virus.

Now they just code some script kiddie junk and it works somehow. The "rootkit" part is coded by real coders, just bundled. The age average must be really in funny levels now.

I remember my friends were following the virus scene just because they were admiring the evil geniuses, now what to collect/watch? windows scripts? :)

Re:Pretty sad!

[PCM2]

The "Mythical Man Month" is a project management concept.

Yes, but it's a concept from a book that was written specifically about software development projects.

What's more, even a "code jockey" is going to be expected to give reasonable estimates of how much time it will take his team to complete a particular task. That's kind of what the MMM is all about.

So, thanks for playing, but if you can't be bothered to read one of the oldest and most respected books about your chosen career then I think it's fair for the recruiter to note that, at the very least, you don't read much.