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. 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. >