Episode 14 Notes - Creeping Towards Viruses
Oct 9, 2019
Computer viruses in 2019 are a real threat, but that wasn't always the case. In fact, some of the earliest viruses were not even that real. A perfect example of this is The Scarred Man, a sci-fi short story written in 1969 by Gregory Benford. First published in Venture Science Fiction in 1970, The Scarred Man includes the earliest depiction of a computer virus, right down to the name. And when you get right down to the details what Benford describes sounds shockingly like modern viruses. The program, called "VIRUS", starts out as malicious code hidden on a single computer. It then runs at random intervals and attempts to connect to another computer at random(in the story it's via phone lines). The virus is able to spread quickly and infect many computers causing performance issues on affected systems. No one, besides VIRUS's creators, know the true origin of the plague until long after it has spread.
The interesting twist is that
the programers who made VIRUS go into the business of removing
their malicious code from computers, for pay of course.
The Scarred Man
was met with poor reviews, both by
critics and Benford himself. It definitely falls into the category
of generic pulp sci-fi. Despite that, it still serves as a good
prediction of things to come. If you want to read the story for
yourself Benford has a copy of it, complete with author's notes,
posted on his website(http://www.gregorybenford.com/extra/the-scarred-man-returns/).
Only a year after
The Scarred Man
hit shelves the first real virus
would be written. This first outing, called Creeper, came about not
as an attack but rather as a demonstration program. Originally
written by Bob Thomas and later modified by Ray Tomlinson, Creeper
was part a larger of distributed computing research effort at BBN
in the 70s. The program was first meant as a way to test migrating
processes from one machine to another. In this iteration Creeper
was a traveling program moving from machine to machine across the
ARPANET. Soon after, it was modified to stay on machines it
traveled through, and thus Creeper became the world's first virus.
But what did it actually do to 'infected' machines? Well, not much.
It just printed out "I'M THE CREEPER : CATCH ME IF YOU
CAN!".
If you want to learn more about the early days of the computer virus, you can listen to my episode on the topic:
