Elk Cloner is considered the first computer virus in history, developed in 1982 by the American student Richard “Rich” Skrenta, aged just 15. Born as a joke to have fun with your friends, the virus was created to infect the Apple II’s DOS operating system via a simple floppy disk.
Based on Skrenta’s idea, on November 11, 1983, university student Fred Cohen presented a self-replicating software agent, developed for educational purposes and capable of taking control of computers in less than an hour, always propagating through digital memory disks.
How Elk Cloner, the first computer virus in history, was born
Rich Skrenta developed what later became the first computer virus in history at the age of 15. 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), Elk Cloner was also not designed to cause damage, nor to generate important side effects: once 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 details, the Elk Cloner virus was copied into the boot of the floppy disk, i.e. in the boot sector, to then be loaded during the computer startup, together with the operating system. In addition to infecting the individual computer, 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, Skrenta’s goal was not to create a malicious virus: that’s why the only inconveniences created were similar to errors. In fact, starting from the tenth reboot, Elk Cloner performed a different action, from displaying inverted or flashing text on the screen, to freezing the system.
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 1980s and 1990s, Elk Cloner spread rapidly: according to some rumors, the first computer virus in history even infected the computer of a member of the United States Navy.
