On Nov 3, 2019, Paul Winalski <paul.winalski@gmail.com> wrote:

On 11/2/19, Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com> 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.