SOME HISTORY OF THE COMPUTER VIRUS

Though protecting yourself from a computer virus today involves mainly Internet security and anti-virus scanning and removal tools, “back in the day” computer viruses were a little bit different.

In the early days of personal computers, before widespread access to any type of computer network, most viruses that did spread were spread with the exchange of infected floppy disks.  Users would have a “hot” new video game on a floppy disk and sometimes unknown to them there would also be a virus.  As this “hot” new video game was traded and installed from one friend’s computer to the next, the virus spread.

Early on, computer viruses were very rare, but as the popularity of personal computers picked up, so did the accumulation of computer viruses.  Though the first reported computer virus is often acknowledged to be the Elk Cloner virus (written by Rich Skrenta in 1982 and spread via floppy disk), it wasn’t until dial up connections and online
bulletin boards became popular in the late 1980s that computer viruses became more plentiful.  Shareware and Freeware files became an easy place for a virus writer to insert his virus into.  An innocent party would go to download the program of their choice and suddenly be infected.

Throughout the mid 1990s viruses became more and more complex.  During the late 90s there was a trend of distributing delayed reaction viruses so that they would proliferate to a large number of computers and then on a certain date or time they would all activate at once.  Most modern viruses are unleashed through the Internet or Email and replicate
themselves rather quickly before sending themselves on to new victims. An updated and current anti-virus program, along with a good dose of common sense, is the best weapon against a computer virus.