Remember Apple II computers? They were common in school classrooms in
the 1980s...which is fitting, because this early virus, perhaps the
first to target personal computers, was designed for Apple IIs and
written by a high-school kid.
Richard Skrenta was a ninth-grader in
1982 when he wrote the virus, which caused infected computers to
display a poem every 50th time they booted up.
That's it, just a poem (ah, we were
so innocent back then). Because Elk Cloner was a boot sector virus, it
infected any floppy disk that was placed in the computer …which in turn
infected other computers.
By now, that kind of stuff is a given, but in 1982, it was groundbreaking.
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