Elk Cloner, which went down in history as the “world’s first computer virus”, was created by a 15-year-old boy as a joke and reached millions!
High school student named Rich Skrenta told his friends and acquaintances, He wanted to make a joke using his software skills.
A poem would appear on the screen of everyone to whom he gave the floppy disks whose codes he changed, and it would be copied to other floppy disks. Look what happened next…
The person who created the virus was only 15 years old.
Rich Skrenta, a mischievous young man in the 1980s, was doing amateur programming while he was still a high school student. on computer game discs by changing codes He had planned to play a prank on his friends.
Skrenta loaded the code he created with his Apple computer onto floppy disks. stored virus, when the user started a computer with an infected floppy disk, it would be copied to all floppy disks. Skrenta distributed it to his friends and acquaintances at school.
The virus has copied widely.
At that time, computers had dual floppy disk drives and floppy disks were often shared among people. That’s why the virus copied many times and millions of Apple systems spread.
Every 50th time an infected computer is started This poem by Skrenta was displayed:
“Elk Cloner: The program with personality
It will enter all your disks
It will infiltrate your chips
Yes this is Cloner!
It will stick to you like glue
“It will also change the RAM”
It was the first virus in computer history.
Although Elk Cloner was a virus that initially caused users to panic, it was not very harmful and it was not difficult to prevent it. It was the first computer virus in history. Skrenta said in an interview in 2007:
“I guess if I had to choose between being known for this and being known for nothing, to be known for it “I would choose.”
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