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Does anybody know when the first computer virus was created? To get the discussion going, I'll draw a line in the sand: it was no later than 1971. In 1971, as a graduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, I was working on a multiuser PDP-11. I created a process that (a) checked to see if an identical copy of itself was also running as an active process, and if not, created a copy of itself and started it running; (b) checked to see if any disk space (which all users shared) was available, and if so, created a file the size of that space; and (c) looped back to step (a). As a result, the process stole all available disk space. When users tried to save files, the operating system advised them that the disk was full and that they needed to delete some existing files. Of course, if they did delete a file, my process would immediately snatch up the available space. When they called in a system administrator to fix the problem, he examined the active processes, discovered my "evil" process, and deleted it. Of course, before he left the room, the other evil process would create another copy of itself, and the problem wouldn't go away. The only way to make the computer work again was to reboot. Of course, 1971 predates the use of the term virus. But does anybody know of any earlier instances of virus-like software?

Al Davis Professor
University of Colorado
adavis@uccs.edu

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