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At the time I though it was hysterically funny. “I gave a floppy to one of the guys at the computer club, and it worked. “I decided to booby trap new games to put up a message,” he recalls. He sometimes altered the floppy discs he shared with friends so that they would display on-screen messages or shut down thier computer. It was this that got him thinking about how he could use this mechanism to play tricks on his pals.
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There was a thriving pirate software market and people used to exchange games and software on floppy discs,” he explains. I used to copy software and share it with friends. “I was a member of a computer club in Pittsburgh. Software piracy was rife, and Skrenta was right in the middle of the scene. The Apple II came with two floppy disk drives, and enthusiasts shared software and games through computer clubs. This taught him to program in Basic and he later picked up assembly language skills. Skrenta wrote his own text-based adventure game, the opening of which placed the gamer into the role of a survivor of an airliner crash. I spent every waking hour immersed in computer games and programming.” Skrenta received an Apple II Computer as a Christmas gift in 1980. “The physical stuff was frustrating by comparison,” he added. “With programming I discovered a way to mimic things I saw in the movies,” Skrenta says, noting that some of his favourite films at the time were 2001: A Space Obyssey and Colossus: The Forbin Project.
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I didn’t even find it easy putting together railway sets.” At elementary school, I used to experiment with vacuum tube radios but the slightest mistake during construction meant they didn’t work. “I wanted to build a robot but there was no kit available and I had no mechanical skills. “I was a geek and a computer nerd, interested in all aspects of technology,” he says.
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Computer viruses had been created before, but Skrenta’s prank app was the first to spread in the wild, outside the computer system or network on which it was created. It will stick to you like glue It will modify ram too Send in the Cloner!Įlk Cloner, which played other, more subtle tricks every five boots, caused no real harm but managed to spread widely. It will get on all your disks It will infiltrate your chips Yes it's Cloner! Infected computers would display a short poem, also written by Skrenta, on every fiftieth boot from an infected disk:Įlk Cloner: The program with a personality
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Uninfected discs inserted into the same computer were given a dose of the malware just as soon as a user keyed in the command catalog for a list of files. If an Apple II booted from an infected floppy disk, Elk Cloner became resident in the computer’s memory. The boot sector virus was written for Apple II systems, the dominant home computers of the time, and infected floppy discs. When Rich Skrenta, created Elk Cloner as a prank in February 1982, he was a 15-year-old high school student with a precocious ability in programming and an overwhelming interest in computers. To the author of Elk Cloner, the first computer virus to be released outside of the lab, it’s sad that, 30 years after the self-replicating code's appearance, the industry has yet to come up with a secure operating system.