The history of viruses dates back to the second half of the 20th century. However, more accurate data differ: some argue that the first viruses appeared in the 1960s, others argue that it was 1981. The point is what exactly can be considered a virus.
The first pseudo-viruses
The key word in defining a virus is “malicious”. The same programs, which are called the first viruses, did not cause any harm to the computer. It was, for example, the computer game "Animal", which consists in guessing animals and has gathered a myriad of fans. The author of the game was tired of endless requests from users to send them this game (and in 1974 it was not an easy task - it was necessary to record the game on magnetic tape and send it by mail). Therefore, he created a subroutine "Pervade", which independently "traveled" from computer to computer and recorded the game "Animal" in each of them. It is unlikely that at least one computer suffered from this simple "surprise".
Creeper, introduced in the early 1970s, was a self-propelled demo program: when a new copy of Creeper was launched on a new computer, the previous one would stop working. And her job was only to display the message "I am Creeper … catch me if you can." Later, the Reaper program was written, which also moved from computer to computer and "hunted" for Creeper, blocking him.
Slightly more annoying and similar to a real virus was the Cookie monster. This program displayed the phrase "Give me cookies" to the terminal and blocked it until the operator entered the word "cookie".
True pioneering viruses
One of the real first viruses is considered to be written by a 15-year-old schoolboy Elk Cloner for personal computers Apple II. It also did not affect the operation of the computer, but could already unintentionally damage disks containing a non-standard DOS image, overwrite backup tracks, regardless of their content. After every 50th boot, the virus displayed a rhyme saying that Elk Cloner is a program with a personality that "gets into all your disks, gets into all your chips, sticks to you like glue, and changes your RAM."
His contemporary, Virus 1, 2, 3, was about the same, although he appeared independently of Cloner. Both viruses were created in 1981.
Soon, the era of truly malicious viruses began, which “disguised themselves” as useful programs and destroyed user data. Fred Cohen even wrote an article on file viruses - the first academic study on the topic. It is Cohen who is considered to be the author of the term "virus", although this term was suggested by his scientific advisor.
