The Morris Worm Wasn't The First

Added: 2026-05-16

[00:00:00]November 2nd, 1988.

[00:00:02]A graduate student at Cornell University releases a piece of code onto the internet.

[00:00:07]He says he just wanted to measure how big it was.

[00:00:11]Chaos ensues. and research centers are still recovering tonight. that it has made its way to Europe and to Australia.

[00:00:19]Within hours, roughly 10% of every machine connected to the internet has ground to a halt. At MIT, 200 computers were infected. Across the country, the toll might be 6,000.

[00:00:29]>> [music] >> It's an act of sabotage that started on a floppy disk.

[00:00:33]It's the work of Robert Morris. I suspect it's an A student, a good A student. And he didn't write the first worm. It's benign. It's not malicious.

[00:00:42]It attempts to do no damage.

[00:00:47]By the self my time at school school, I never had a science lesson in my life.

[00:00:52]John Brunner, the Shockwave Rider.

[00:00:55]Actually try to establish extrapolate contemporary trends, >> [music] >> then you have to impose yourself a very firm discipline. Creating his hacker protagonist Arsenal, Brunner reached for biology. have to make all your projections abide by the trends and tendencies [music] you can see in the contemporary world. The tapeworm, a digestive parasite.

[00:01:17]It's not malicious. It attempts to do no damage besides propagate itself.

[00:01:21]Cut a worm in half and it still wriggles.

[00:01:25]1980.