Elk Cloner It is considered the first computer virus in history, developed in 1982 by the American student Richard “Rich” Skrentajust 15 years old. Born as a joke to have fun with your friends, the virus was created to infect the Apple II DOS operating system through a simple floppy disks.
Based on Skrenta’s idea, on November 11, 1983 the university student Fred Cohen in turn presented a software agent capable of self-replicating, developed for educational purposes and capable of taking control of computers in less than an hour, always propagating itself through digital memory disks.
How Elk Cloner, the first computer virus in history, was born
Rich Skrenta at the age of 15 he developed what later became the first computer virus in history, Elk Cloner. A member of his high school’s computer club, Skrenta was already known for modifying games and software that he shared with his friends: hence the idea of creating, as a sort of joke, software that was capable of infecting the Apple DOS 3.3 operating system.
As in the case of Creeper (the first malware in history), also Elk Cloner It was not designed to cause harm, nor to generate significant side effects: once the computers were infected, in fact, the virus only generated small usability and user experience inconveniences, such as the display of annoying messages.
How the Elk Cloner virus worked
Going into detail, the Elk Cloner virus was copied to boot of the floppy diski.e. in the boot sector, to then be loaded during the computer startup, together with the operating system. In addition to infecting individual computers, the virus could also self-replicate on other computers via an infected floppy disk: in practice, this happened when a clean floppy disk was inserted into the infected computer and the user typed the command catalogue to get a list of files.
As mentioned, the goal of Skrenta it wasn’t to create a malicious virus: that’s why the only inconveniences created were similar to errors. Starting from the tenth reboot, in fact, Elk Cloner performed a different action, from displaying an inverted text or flashing on the screen, until the system freezes.
At the 50th start, however, Elk Cloner displayed the text below:
Aside from the display of these messages and other minor inconveniences, the virus has never caused any drastic negative effects. However, also due to the widespread use of floppy disks during the 80s and 90s, Elk Cloner spread rapidly: according to some rumours, the first computer virus in history even reached infect the computer of a member of the United States Navy.
