While you’re at it, define “first” for us as well. I’m starting to think that word means something different to you than to the rest of us.
Perhaps the reason that no one is as thrilled as you think they should be is that early PC security was so brain damaged, versus known best practices, that writing a virus for one was not all that hard. People had been exploiting security holes long before that - I helped someone find holes in OS 360 macros that left you in supervisor mode in 1969 (we never did any damage - just printed messages proving we had done it). The Firesign Theatre’s “I Think We are all Bozos on This Bus” from 1871 was about hacking. I read quite a few pre-Morris worm papers on this kind of thing. The first virus is like the first tic-tac-toe program - only interesting if there are some interesting characters involved.
ACM and IEEE both have computer history journals - you might check those to see what has been covered. I don’t get them myself.
Leaving “the first” aside, an insider’s account of the early days of malicious coding may still make an interesting read. People want to know what makes virus writers tick.
A book that gives a firsthandaccount of the development of an early virus, the motivations of the people behind it, how it was released, how they reacted to its spread … this all sounds (to me) like it might find an audience, although I say this without having any idea how many similar publications exist.
I will leave that as an exercise for the reader.
Come on. Some old “viruses” you can completely ignore and they will not affect your life one bit. You wouldn’t care about them even if they waste a certain small percentage of your time. They don’t do anything. There is no need to get rid of them. They don’t matter to the user. You can ignore a few characters on the screen. You can continue to work on the PC. They might change the volume name of your diskette back in 1985. Other modern viruses will encrypt your hard drive and ask for a password. Can you see the difference?
I don’t want to play anymore.
Unless you answer my original questions like Exapno did.
Thanks Cazzle!
I would agree with this…if it’s an interesting, well-told story, it doesn’t necessarily have to be about THE VERY FIRST ONE!!! Extra points (possibly a lot of them) if you’re able to tell your story in a way that is understandable and engaging to someone who (unlike yourself) is not hip-deep in knowledge of the industry and its history.
And, as you’ve seen just in this thread, any sort of primacy claim is likely to open you up to arguments from your audience on timing, and definitions.
I agree with Cazzle. sbright33, don’t take any of the criticism in this thread as malicious. We’re only challenging you on these claims to help you get your story straight, just as any good editor would. This is nothing compared to the hammering your intended audience would have brought down on you had you published a book containing what you wrote in the OP. You’ve already backed down from some of those claims, we’re just trying to help you find the reality in the rest of them. Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence, but you really haven’t presented much of the latter yet.
Thanks Scott I appreciate it! Can you see what I mean about DO SOMETHING, without making me define the words? It’s common sense that we all have. SOMETHING could mean ask for a cookie. Play a song. Display an animated picture. Ask for a password. Reboot causing all work to be lost. Displaying a few words of text for a moment hardly qualifies as significant. Unless it’s one frame in a commercial movie that most people cannot see!
I think it might make an interesting article in Wired, especially because of the supporting Time article documenting the damage it caused at the time. It’s clearly not the first virus, or the first damaging virus. It didn’t launch an industry or shift a paradigm. Nobody is going to look back to that fateful day when sbright33 and his friends got bored and ruined our innocence forever.
So you’re not going to spark everyone’s memory and explain an important bit of history. But you can tell an interesting anecdote, proving that the anecdote actually proves to be interesting and you have a good story behind it (bolding above). And then basic “good story” rules apply. You need a hero, preferably a plucky underdog, some kind of adversity, a nice story arc, etc. The problem I see is that you’re the villains, and nobody’s going to be rooting for you. Aside from basic writing talent, you need the ability to twist this story in a way that doesn’t just make you seem like a jerk. And that’s going to take a fair amount of skill.
I guess it depends on what the words are. It would be impressive in 1985 for a PC to display “Happy Birthday” on your birthday.
Moved Cafe Society --> MPSIMS.
I wouldn’t get too hung up about the specifics of what it did in comparison to other viruses, because this makes it seem that you’re still trying to establish a “first” of some sort to tell your story. As Cazzle mentioned upthread, you may well be able to establish priority on some specific feature within some very narrow criteria, but it sounds like that criteria will be too esoteric to make a very exciting hook for your story.
If you just change all the “first” references to “one of the earliest” and leave it at that, you could still have an interesting story with general appeal. Who knows, maybe yours was only the fifth virus released in its general class, but you may still be the “first” author to come clean about his exploits 30 years later.
Why would that have been impressive in 1985?
I meant if there is no EXE running. You never saved your birthday. Maybe you typed it in an Email or word processing. I was being silly. Back then PC’s required you to type in the Date and Time when it boots!
I may get in trouble for this but…
If your friend created the first virus, your friend should be murdered
No no no, it was nowhere near the first. It ran on a Timex ZX79 only in 2001. In fact it doesn’t do anything. It just beeps once then deletes itself.
My PCs didn’t. Maybe you should have started with better hardware.
Come on. Think back before that. It couldn’t remember the time and it cost $1000.
The original IBM PC, along with the XT that immediately followed it, did not have built-in clocks. (Likewise for the Apple II, and all the popular home computers of those early years.) So you did indeed have to tell DOS the current date and time when you booted the machine.
The Apple didn’t come with a clock until GS in 1987.
Before then, even with extra hardware, you had to Peek in ProDos to get it.
I’m sure you guys were just beginning to dabble in PCs in the 80s and still bathing in the glorious aura of ‘your own real computer’, but I’d been at it for a while back then. I had several machines with clocks in them, and they did whatever I wanted when they booted. You really need some perspective on the history of computers before the retail toys became available, and what was happening outside of the retail market.