From: abostick@netcom.com (Alan Bostick)
Date: Thu, 15 Dec 94 15:43:24 PST
To: perry@imsi.com
Subject: Re: Articles on Adelman and E=mc(2)
In-Reply-To: <9412131605.AA12267@snark.imsi.com>
Message-ID: <44uxkyczB8-P073yn@netcom.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


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In article <9412131605.AA12267@snark.imsi.com>, you wrote:
> 
> The article contains a serious inaccuracy -- it credits Adleman with
> having invented the term "Computer Virus", when, in fact, it was
> probably John Brunner in his novel "The Shockwave Rider" over ten
> years earlier. It also inaccurately credits one of his students with
> developing the first one as a test, when in fact they existed for a
> long time before.
> 
> .pm
> 

The notion of a computer virus predates THE SHOCKWAVE RIDER.  Gregory
Benford used the notion in a short story published in AMAZING STORIES in
1973 or 1974.  It was an idea mentioned in passing in a story taking
place in a mining town in Antarctica.  (Sorry, but I can't provide any
more bibliographic data than that; I'm relying strictly on memory.)
Benford definitely used the word "virus" to describe how the thing
reproduces. 

In 1975 (the same year that THE SHOCKWAVE RIDER came out) Laser Books
published the notoriously bad SEEDS OF CHANGE, by Thomas F.  Monteleone. 
Monteleone has the Evial Computer That Rules The World brought down by
feeding it something called a "Benford program," i.e. a virus.

I couldn't say for sure whether the idea of computer viruses was
original to Benford or not.  He is a theoretical plasma physicist who in
his misspent youth worked at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in
the weapons program.  It is possible that he worked on numerical
modeling of plasmas in a secure computing environment, and that viruses
were part of the threat models of the Livermore computer security
people.

If he did invent the idea, then he has a lot to answer for. . . .

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