History and stories
Elk Cloner: the first virus spread on floppy disks
One of the first computer viruses to spread in the wild was a joke written by a high school student, passed around on game disks.
1 min readStory
The short version
In 1982, a 15-year-old wrote a prank program that copied itself from one Apple II floppy disk to the next.
The story
In 1982, Rich Skrenta, a 15-year-old high school student in Pennsylvania, wrote a small program for the Apple II as a joke. He put it on a game disk and shared it with friends.
When someone started the computer from an infected disk, the program loaded itself into memory. From then on, any clean floppy disk put into the machine got a copy. Friends swapped disks, and the program travelled with them.
Most of the time it did nothing visible. Every 50th time the infected disk was used, the screen went blank and showed a short poem that began “Elk Cloner: the program with a personality.”
Why it mattered
Elk Cloner did no real damage, but it proved an idea that had only existed in theory: a program could spread on its own, from computer to computer, by riding along with things people shared. Nobody had to break in. People carried it themselves.
The lesson today
The floppy disk is gone, but the pattern is the same. Malware still travels on things people pass along willingly: email attachments, shared files and USB drives. That is why security tools watch what programs do, and why it pays to be careful about what you open.
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