Elk Cloner is one of the first known microcomputer viruses that spread "in the wild," i.e., outside the computer system or lab in which it was written. It was written for Apple II systems around 1982 by a 15-year-old high school student named Rich Skrenta.
Elk Cloner spread by infecting the Apple II operating system using a technique now known as a "boot sector" virus. If a computer booted from an infected floppy disk, a copy of the virus was pla...
More
Elk Cloner is one of the first known microcomputer viruses that spread "in the wild," i.e., outside the computer system or lab in which it was written. It was written for Apple II systems around 1982 by a 15-year-old high school student named Rich Skrenta.
Elk Cloner spread by infecting the Apple II operating system using a technique now known as a "boot sector" virus. If a computer booted from an infected floppy disk, a copy of the virus was placed in the computer's memory. When an uninfected disk was inserted into the computer, Elk Cloner would be copied to the disk, allowing it to spread from disk to disk.
An infected computer would display a short poem on every 50th boot:
Elk Cloner did not cause deliberate harm, but Apple DOS disks without a standard image had their reserved tracks overwritten.
Elk Cloner was created in 1981 by Rich Skrenta, a 15-year-old high school student. Skrenta was already distrusted by his friends because, in sharing computer games and software, he would...
Less