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.