[TUHS] Happy birthday Morris worm

[Paul McJones]

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 <paul.winalski at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On 11/2/19, Warner Losh <imp at bsdimp.com <mailto:imp at 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.

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