The computer virus turns 25 years old this year. It's been a rocky quarter-century, but according to Richard Ford and Eugene Spafford, two computer scientists writing in this week's issue of the journal Science, viruses can look forward to a long, fruitful life. The researchers say that in today's hyper-connected world, when everything's got a chip in it and is running software, stopping malware is basically an impossible task. (Their article is not online.)
The computer virus conception story begins in 1981, when a tech-savvy 9th grader named Richard Skrenta got an Apple II for Christmas. Over the following few months he began cooking up ways to trick his friends using the machine. "I had been playing jokes on schoolmates by altering copies of pirated games to self-destruct after a number of plays," Skrenta once told the tech news site Security Focus. "I'd give out a new game, they'd get hooked, but then the game would stop working with a snickering comment from me on the screen."
When his friends realized his tricky ways, they banned Skrenta from their machines. And that's when he had an epiphany: He could put his code on the school's computer, and rig it to copy itself onto floppy disks that students used on the system. Thus was born Elk Cloner, the world's first computer virus to spread in the wild. The virus didn't do much damage; it infected the Apple II's OS and copied itself to other floppies, and every so often would display a tittering message on the screen:
Elk Cloner: The program with a personality
It 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
*machinist.salon.com/blog/2007/07/12/virus_birthday/index.html
The computer virus conception story begins in 1981, when a tech-savvy 9th grader named Richard Skrenta got an Apple II for Christmas. Over the following few months he began cooking up ways to trick his friends using the machine. "I had been playing jokes on schoolmates by altering copies of pirated games to self-destruct after a number of plays," Skrenta once told the tech news site Security Focus. "I'd give out a new game, they'd get hooked, but then the game would stop working with a snickering comment from me on the screen."
When his friends realized his tricky ways, they banned Skrenta from their machines. And that's when he had an epiphany: He could put his code on the school's computer, and rig it to copy itself onto floppy disks that students used on the system. Thus was born Elk Cloner, the world's first computer virus to spread in the wild. The virus didn't do much damage; it infected the Apple II's OS and copied itself to other floppies, and every so often would display a tittering message on the screen:
Elk Cloner: The program with a personality
It 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
*machinist.salon.com/blog/2007/07/12/virus_birthday/index.html
may be worms someday(in a decade may be 
