The first ever computer virus, created in 1982 and called “Elk Cloner” was written by a 15 year old in Pennsylvania. Rich Skrenta was a high school student who enjoyed loading secret programs onto any floppy disk he could find, but soon he figured out a smarter way to spread his digital pranks. He infected his high school’s Apple II computer with his Elk Cloner program, which would then find it’s way onto any floppy disk that was put in the drive. (on the Apple II you would have to insert a new disk for every program you wanted to run)
What terror did he choose to inflict upon his classmates? Pretty much the worst thing that any high-school student could fear… poetry. On every 50th load of an infected disk, the screen would display this poem in all it’s green-on-black horror:
Elk Cloner: The program with a personalityIt will get on all your disks
It will infiltrate your chips
Yes, it’s Cloner!It will stick to you like glue
It will modify RAM too
Send in the Cloner!
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elk_Cloner
