[TUHS] Happy birthday Morris worm

[Dan Cross]

On Mon, Nov 4, 2019 at 1:58 PM Bakul Shah <bakul at bitblocks.com> wrote:

> 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.
>
>
In the 1983 movie "Wargames", at the very end as the staff at NORAD
desperately try and disable the rogue artificial intelligence hell-bent on
starting World War III, at one point they make a suggestion to send a
"tapeworm" into the system", but it's judged too risky. They ultimately
defeat the computer by getting it to play tic-tac-toe against itself and
learn that nuclear war is unwinnable.

        - Dan C.


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 <paul at mcjones.org> 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 <paul.winalski at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> On 11/2/19, Warner Losh <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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