High school student named Rich Skrenta told his friends and acquaintances: He wanted to make a joke with his software skills.

A poem would appear on the screen of everyone he gave the floppies to whose codes he changed, and it would be copied to other floppies. Look what happened next…

The person who created the virus was only 15 years old.

Rich Skrenta, a mischievous young man from the 1980s, did amateur programming while still in high school. on computer game discs by changing codes He planned to play a prank on his friends.

Skrenta loaded the code he created with his Apple computer onto floppy disks. stored virus, when the user booted a computer with an infected diskette, it was copied to all diskettes. Skrenta distributed it to his friends and acquaintances at school.

The virus has copied itself on a large scale.

At that time, computers had dual disk drives and diskettes were often shared among people. That is why the virus was copied many times millions of Apple systems scatter.

An infected computer is started every 50th time This poem by Skrenta was displayed:

“Elk Cloner: the program with personality

It ends up on all your drives

It will infiltrate your chips

Yes, this is Cloner!

It sticks to you like glue

“It will also change the RAM”

It was the first virus in computer history.

Although Elk Cloner was a virus that initially panicked users, it was not very harmful and was not difficult to prevent. It was the first computer virus in history. Skrenta said in a 2007 interview:

“I guess if I had to choose between being known for this or being known for nothing, are known for it “I would choose.”

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