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What's the history of Virus?
The word ‘virus’ to computer programmers and other tech-savvy computer users is the stuff that nightmares are made of and computer viruses today have become so rampant and so complex that it takes some fine software programs and constant maintenance to always ensure that one of these nasty little bugs doesn’t get into your system and after taking over your hard drive, taking over your life. There have been so many created since that first one in the 1970s that it’s often hard even for top-of-the-line software to be able to catch all of them before they can wreak their havoc. But what was the first computer virus to ever be deemed viable enough to really do some harm?
Most people think that the virus that was called “Rother J” was the first virus to ever appear anywhere except the lab that it was created in, which computer geeks term as being ‘in the wild.’ However, although this was the first virus to appear within households, the first actual computer virus was the Creeper, which first showed up on what could be considered a very early edition of the Internet, the ARPANET. It used any modem that was connected and could dial out to reach computers and infect them and once infected, the user on the other end would see the message displayed: “I’M THE CREEPER: CATCH ME IF YOU CAN.” A copycat virus was soon released and was called the Reaper and this virus found the Creeper virus on systems and destroyed it. It’s believed that the creator is the same for both programs and that the latter was created because the creator felt guilty about creating the first, which had done so much damage.
The word ‘virus’ to computer programmers and other tech-savvy computer users is the stuff that nightmares are made of and computer viruses today have become so rampant and so complex that it takes some fine software programs and constant maintenance to always ensure that one of these nasty little bugs doesn’t get into your system and after taking over your hard drive, taking over your life. There have been so many created since that first one in the 1970s that it’s often hard even for top-of-the-line software to be able to catch all of them before they can wreak their havoc. But what was the first computer virus to ever be deemed viable enough to really do some harm?
Most people think that the virus that was called “Rother J” was the first virus to ever appear anywhere except the lab that it was created in, which computer geeks term as being ‘in the wild.’ However, although this was the first virus to appear within households, the first actual computer virus was the Creeper, which first showed up on what could be considered a very early edition of the Internet, the ARPANET. It used any modem that was connected and could dial out to reach computers and infect them and once infected, the user on the other end would see the message displayed: “I’M THE CREEPER: CATCH ME IF YOU CAN.” A copycat virus was soon released and was called the Reaper and this virus found the Creeper virus on systems and destroyed it. It’s believed that the creator is the same for both programs and that the latter was created because the creator felt guilty about creating the first, which had done so much damage.
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