In the year 1981, Richard Skrenta got an Apple II series microcomputer as his Christmas gift. Skrenta in his 9th grade then was exited beyond bounds as computers were his favorite. He said ““I had always been mechanically curious, taking apart tube radios and telephones and wiring up O gauge Lionel train sets when I was young. When I got an Apple II in the 7th grade, I was in heaven”.
Being a smart kid that he was, he always tried to come up with tricks, ways in which he could fool his friends. “I had been playing jokes on schoolmates by altering copies of pirated games to self-destruct after a number of plays. I’d give out a new game, they’d get hooked, but then the game would stop working with a snickering comment from me on the screen (9th grade humor at work here)”, he once told on Security Focus.
Since the output message was too personal, his friends were smart enough to figure who the almighty was responsible for it and they banned Skrenta from their machines. This forced Skrenta to go a step beyond and put his “small piece” of code on the school’s computer and thus was born Elk Cloner, the worlds first known computer virus. The virus was not meant to hurt the Apple computers but to annoy all his friends who abandoned him.
The virus could attach itself to the Apple DOS 3.3 operating system and then onto floppy disks, from floppy disks to other machines and so on. It was the first spread “in the wild” viruses. The tittering message it would slash across the screen read:
Elk Cloner: The program with a personality
It will get on all your disks
It will infiltrate your chips
Yes it’s Cloner!
It will stick to you like glue
It will modify RAM too
Send in the Cloner!