An early internet virus, as reported in 1988

In the season 2 finale of Halt and Catch Fire, series down-and-out antihero Joe MacMillan infected and “sanitised” a venture capital manager’s computer in a last ditch effort to obtain funds (he secured $10 million in VC after his stunt). In the real world and a few years later, there was a real computer virus causing real issues without a crooked guy holding a floppy disk to save it.

The virus, known as the Morris Worm was created by Robert Tappan Morris, an American computer scientist who was convicted for his crime but went on to co-found a VC funding firm of his own—you might have heard of it. The Morris Worm was one of the first programs to replicate itself through networked computers, intended to show security vulnerabilities but went on to crash thousands of computers, caused millions of dollars in damages and took multiple days to remove from just one computer. The fact that he was able to do that and still become a major VC guy AND return to MIT as a professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science says all you need to know about capitalism and white—male—privilege (and exactly what the character of Joe MacMillan was all about).

But I digress. The video above shows the incident and how it was reported.

Virus related: Can DOS viruses ruin modern PCs? Yes.

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