I recall the Morris worm quite well; I was driving down 101 to Mountain View (Silicon Valley) when KGO broke the story. A few seconds later, I was surprised to see the speedometer well over 100 MPH. I parked half in a handicapped space and half on the lawn, vaulted the security barrier, and darted into the machine room. With my remaining breath, I slurred "shut it down, NOW" to my boss who was in front of the gateway machine and, to his credit, he immediately turned off the main power. BUT.

The Morris worm wasn't the first. The folks at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) invented the worm about ten years before, as part of their seminal research into local area network computing (as distinguished from the work at BBN, UC Berkeley, etc. which was focused on wide-area networking and developed into the Internet Protocols.)PARC's hardware and firmware design was the basis for the modern Ethernet, though most of their networking software and higher level protocols failed. During their research, they ran into problems with their Network Operating System, a worm design, and had to create a virus or worm that would kill the NOS faster than the NOS could download and restart itself on each individual machine. (They had built too well--shades of "The Sorcerer's Apprentice!") The New York Times covered this in an article around 1972-1978. If anyone would like the exact reference, let me know and I'll dig it out of my files (currently hidden behind a lamp, a computer, the front panel of a "Star Trek" arcade game, and other things you probably don't want to know about. :-)

Morris's work was significant, but it wasn't "first," by many years.

I can be reached as "ds special-symbol-you-know-well synthespia dot-symbol com" after you despammify.

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