On Mon, Nov 4, 2019 at 1:58 PM Bakul Shah wrote: > I am surprised no one mentioned *The Shockwave Rider *by John Brunner, > published in 1975. Excerpt: > > Then the answer dawned on him, and he almost laughed. Fluckner had > resorted to one of the oldest tricks in the store and turned loose in the > continental net a selfperpetuating tapeworm, probably headed by a > denunciation group "borrowed" from a major corporation, which would shunt > itself from one nexus to another every time his credit-code was punched > into a keyboard. It could take days to kill a worm like that, and sometimes > weeks. > > In the 1983 movie "Wargames", at the very end as the staff at NORAD desperately try and disable the rogue artificial intelligence hell-bent on starting World War III, at one point they make a suggestion to send a "tapeworm" into the system", but it's judged too risky. They ultimately defeat the computer by getting it to play tic-tac-toe against itself and learn that nuclear war is unwinnable. - Dan C. I read it in late 70s/early 80s and don't remember much of it but this bit > had burrowed its way in my subconscious. I have been meaning to re-read it > along with Stand on Zanzibar but they would be too depressing in the > present era! > > On Nov 4, 2019, at 10:10 AM, Paul McJones wrote: > > Another possible source of inspiration — including the name “worm” — were > the publications by John Shoch and Jon Hupp on programs they wrote at Xerox > PARC around 1979-1980 and published in 1980 and 1982: > > John F. Shoch and Jon Hupp: > The “Worm" Programs — Early Experience with a Distributed Computation. > Xerox SSL-80-3 and IEN 159. May 1980, revised September 1980 > http://www.postel.org/ien/pdf/ien159.pdf > > John F. Shoch and Jon Hupp: > The “Worm" Programs — Early Experience with a Distributed Computation. > CACM V25 N3 (March 1982) > http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~margo/cs261/background/shoch.pdf > > On Nov 3, 2019, Paul Winalski wrote: > > > On 11/2/19, Warner Losh wrote: > > > the notion of a self propagating thing > was quite novel (even if it had been theoretically discussed in many places > prior to the worm, and even though others had proven it via slower moving > vectors of BBS). > > > Novel to the Internet community, perhaps, but an idea that dates back > to the 1960s in IBM mainframe circles. Self-submitting OS/360 JCL > jobs, which eventually caused a crash by filling the queue files with > jobs, were well-known in the raised-floor world. > > In hindsight people like to point at it and what a terrible thing it was, > but Robert just got there first. > > > Again, first on the Internet. Back in 1980 I accidentally took down > DEC's internal engineering network (about 100 nodes, mostly VAX/VMS, > at the time) with a worm. ... > > Robert Morris worked as an intern one summer in DEC's compiler group. > The Fortran project leader told Morris about my 1980 worm incident. > So he certainly had heard of the concept before he fashioned his > UNIX/Internet-based worm a few years later. > > -Paul W. > > > >