Gone fishing.

Today, as you may have read in countless online news sites, marks the 25th anniversary of the computer virus. What a thing to celebrate! Thank heavens we mark such events. I really get into tech stories, and although few of us who have ever battled a computer with a virus don't think damn much of them it got me going off to see if this really was the first.

The AP story running now states that somewhere around 1978 a 15 year old created a program that once launched keeps creating copies of itself. The creator made copies and gave them to his friends (for now). When they plugged the floppy in to their computer the virus would burrow its way onto the machines memory. AND, if you put a clean disc in it would copy inself onto that so that when it was passed around it would continue the infection. Such a method of moving digital data around is quite innocently called the "sneakernet". Users literally carried the stuff around on discs to other computers.

Now the Internet had been running of a sorts back then. Mainly still in the realm of universities and the government, the late 70's boasted less than 200 hosts. So its unlikely a 15 year old had access. But by the end of the 80's things had heated up so to speak. ARPANET, the first Internet was reaching the end of its useful life and would soon be split up and expanded in to bigger networks.

Check out the picture above for what it looked like in 1985. Even you non techies can begin to grasp the scope of what was to come based on the sketch by Martin Lyons. Anyways, you need the Internet to have a for true virus like attack. Along came the "Worm" in 1988 and the online experience has never been the same since. A worm is slightly different from a computer virus in that it uses the computers along the way to power itself, in effect using the resources as a kind of digital slingshot.

On or about 6pm on November 2, 1988 odd things began to happen to the burgeoning Internet. The amount of stuff moving through the Internet starts to rise fast. By 9pm most systems have surpassed the number of processes they can handle and are crashing or being shut down by very nervous sytem admins. What is perhaps the first e-mail sent warning of an Internet Virus states that "We are currently under attack from an Internet VIRUS. It has hit UC Berkeley, UC San Diego, Lawrence Livermore, Stanford, and NASA Ames." And shortly thereafter this inciteful gem: "There may be a virus loose on the internet."