The Morris worm or Internet worm of November 2, 1988 was one of the first computer worms distributed via the Internet. It was written by a student at Cornell University, Robert Tappan Morris, and launched on November 2, 1988 from MIT.
It’s trapped on a floppy tho this is some dark shit it has been denied its purpose forever bound to this obsolete storage
am i glad it’s in there and we’re out here
people reading fantasy novels ask “why did the ancient ones seal the evil away for ten thousand years instead of just killing it” but then we go ahead and do this shit
We have learned nothing from every fantasy novel ever O.O
The best part, from the wiki article: “According to its creator, the Morris worm was not written to cause damage, but to gauge the size of the Internet.”
It was intended to do good, but the programmer made a mistake and it got out of hand, becoming viral.
my cousin is 16 (he was born in 2002) and he was asking me about computers and antivirus programs
and i mentioned “the worm” offhand and he was so incredibly confused he thought i was literally talking about a mythical worm
i had to tell him the entire story about an MIT student who created the worm to measure the internet, but failed to program the virus in a way that your computer couldn’t become infected multiple times at once, so the worm would “eat” your system by essentially taking it over with multiple infections
and honestly i’ve never held his attention that long before, it was like i was telling him about some ancient mythos he never heard before
