You will be shocked to know that, in India, a large number of computers have been infected (unknowingly) by service engineers or computer suppliers themselves who carry their infected floppies from machine to machine.

The Origins Of Computer Viruses

The idea of self-replicating software was put forward in the year 1950 by the computer stalwart John Neuman in a paper entitled “Theory &practice of Complicated Automata”. People at that time found this to be absurd and rejected the idea. All but a few, that is. A few programmers kept the idea in mind, and the result was an after-office-hours recreational game that emerged in AT&T's Bell Laboratories in the 1960's. The Core-War Game, as it was called, was the result of some highly innovative thinking on the part of its developers.

Programs, basically act on data - i.e. they “devour” data. The Core-War game programs, instead of devouring data, devoured programs! A couple of programmers would write a set of programs and set them “free” in the computer's memory. Computers, in those days utilized what was termed as “Core Memory”, hence the term “Core Wars”. The programs let loose would scan memory for programs written by other programmers. Upon finding the rival code, the program would “devour” the rival code. After a specific period of time, the programmer with the maximum number of “live code instructions” to his credit would be the winner of the game. This game had the tacit backing of the seniors at AT&T.