The word virus in computer science It is associated with something bad, however, this was not always the case since the first computer virus created did not have bad intentions, quite the contrary. The first computer virus, called Lianawas created to confirm the theory announced by mathematician John Von Neumann in 1949.
The creator of Creeper was Robert H. Thomas in 1971. Robert worked at BBN Technologies, and as he stated, this was an experiment designed to demonstrate the effectiveness of Creeper. Neumann's theory in which it was stated that a program would be able to replicate itself and move from one computer to another over a network.
Creeper, the first computer virus
Robert designed the Creeper virus to jump from one computer to another in 1971. ARPANETcomputers managed by the TENEX operating system. TENEX was an operating system created in 1969 by the same company where Robert worked and installed on PDP-10 computers.
By its operation, constantly replicating itself on any computer connected to the ARPANET, more than a virus, Creeper can be considered as a computer wormsince at that time, the term virus in computing was not yet defined. This little program did not cause any damage to the computer it arrived on, but its only mission was to reach as many computers as possible.
The only unusual thing this virus did was display the message “Catch me if you can” on the screen. We are talking about 1971, when the Internet did not exist and the number of computers connected to ARPANET was very small. Creper came propagated up to 28 computers, all machines that were then on the market managed by the TENEX operating system.
He first computer worm designed with bad intentions was Morrisa worm designed for UNIX in 1988 by Robert Tappan Morris, a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (son of an NSA cryptographer). Robert was the first convicted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act passed in 1986.
Reaper, the first computer antivirus
A year after Creeper, it was released Combinethe first computer antivirus designed to remove Creeper. It was created by Ray Tomlinson, who also worked at BBM Technologies and worked on the development of the TENEX operating system.
Ray Tomlinson implemented the first messaging program on ARPANET, providing the ability to send messages to other users who were not connected to the same server. To do this, you used the @ sign to separate the username on the one hand and the name of the server where the recipient is located on the other hand.
The ARPANET network is the precursor to what we know today as the Internet. It was created by the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the United States Department of Defense. This network was born with the aim of keeping the country's structure in working order in the event of nuclear war, in the middle of the Cold War, and was dismantled in 1990.
