Viruses – the technology kind – can wreak havoc with computer systems around the world. But did you know that they didn't begin with malicious intentions?
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The first computer virus was called Creeper, and was named after a Scooby Doo cartoon show character. Written in 1971 by American programmer Bob Thomas, who worked at the US-based technology firm Bold Beranek and Newman (BBN), the virus was an experimental self-replicating program. It was a worm that targeted computers connected to Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) – a division of the US Department of Defence.
Thomas didn’t intend to cause any harm with Creeper – the virus didn’t have any malicious, harmful or damaging capabilities. He created it to understand the possibility of developing a program that could spread between computers. But the virus ended up corrupting the corporation’s mainframe computers, and messed up their teletype computer screens by displaying the message: “I’m the Creeper, catch me if you can!”
Another early virus called ‘Brain’ was the first computer virus for MS-DOS (a non-graphical command line operating system developed by Microsoft). It appeared in January 1986 and was traced to two brothers in Pakistan.
According to Cyphere, a cyber security services company in the UK, the brothers were tired of customers pirating software from their shop, so they invented the virus to infect the boot sector of floppy disks. As pirated copies were made, the virus spread from disks to computer drives when they were loaded onto new machines. Et voila, customers weren’t eager to pirate copies from their shop any longer!
Have you ever been affected by a computer virus? Play today’s Word Search and tell us what happened at games@gulfnews.com.
