-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- In article <9412131605.AA12267@snark.imsi.com>, you wrote:
The article contains a serious inaccuracy -- it credits Adleman with having invented the term "Computer Virus", when, in fact, it was probably John Brunner in his novel "The Shockwave Rider" over ten years earlier. It also inaccurately credits one of his students with developing the first one as a test, when in fact they existed for a long time before.
.pm
The notion of a computer virus predates THE SHOCKWAVE RIDER. Gregory Benford used the notion in a short story published in AMAZING STORIES in 1973 or 1974. It was an idea mentioned in passing in a story taking place in a mining town in Antarctica. (Sorry, but I can't provide any more bibliographic data than that; I'm relying strictly on memory.) Benford definitely used the word "virus" to describe how the thing reproduces. In 1975 (the same year that THE SHOCKWAVE RIDER came out) Laser Books published the notoriously bad SEEDS OF CHANGE, by Thomas F. Monteleone. Monteleone has the Evial Computer That Rules The World brought down by feeding it something called a "Benford program," i.e. a virus. I couldn't say for sure whether the idea of computer viruses was original to Benford or not. He is a theoretical plasma physicist who in his misspent youth worked at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the weapons program. It is possible that he worked on numerical modeling of plasmas in a secure computing environment, and that viruses were part of the threat models of the Livermore computer security people. If he did invent the idea, then he has a lot to answer for. . . . | For me, to be a feminist is to answer the Alan Bostick | question "Are women human?" with a yes. abostick@netcom.com | finger for PGP public key | Katha Pollitt, REASONABLE CREATURES Key fingerprint: | 50 22 FB 46 41 A3 17 9D F7 33 FF E1 4E 1C 89 79 +legal_kludge=off -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: 2.6.1 iQB1AgUBLu+FYuVevBgtmhnpAQGkGQL/ex3L21RwpndybSOd3lWx1nfqkkbHHKce jWDWmPZsI4njPtcApInPRw4A6/SUwkwBbJqNA0cK78MBeij1mn9pCwuDiviHNeLO ZMBPy9csz8Lyr8N7RO9CZ5o4cgolGGF2 =7PCk -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----