On January 30th, 1982, Richard Skrenta wrote the first wide-spread computer virus, called Elk Cloner.
Skrenta was 15, at the time a high schooler at Mt. Lebanon (PA) High School. It was created as a joke on his friends.
Elk Cloner was the first 'boot sector' virus and was only 400 lines of code long. It worked by attaching itself to the Apple II operating system via a game. When the hapless user launched the game, the virus hanged the game to a blank screen that displayed a poem about... Elk Cloner.
(From Today's Spark)
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