Many, myself included, would rather be celebrating its death but alas the computer virus turns 25 years old this year. Sadly this is one thing that doesn’t look likely to get weaker as it ages. In fact, given the fact that everything and everyone is connected, it’s only getting stronger. Where does the story begin? With an adolescent urge to prank.

A tech-savvy 9th grader named Richard Skrenta got an Apple II for Christmas. Over the following few months he began cooking up ways to trick his friends using the machine. “I had been playing jokes on schoolmates by altering copies of pirated games to self-destruct after a number of plays,” Skrenta once told the tech news site Security Focus. “I’d give out a new game, they’d get hooked, but then the game would stop working with a snickering comment from me on the screen.”

His friends caught on to the prank and banned Skrenta from their machines giving him the brilliant idea of putting code on one computer that would replicate itself onto floppy discs used on the system.
And while the viruses have gotten smarter, fighting them hasn’t. So what is the cure? Ending the Microsoft monopoly? According to an article quoted in Salon that creates other problems.

So until that forever distant future when computer viruses will be contained, happy effing birthday. Thanks for nothing.

Via / Salon Machinist