Re: Was Cohen the first?

[tcmay@got.net (Timothy C. May)]

Little CP relevance, except as re: a former (maybe current, but no longer
actively participating) list member, so I'll be brief.

At 4:24 PM 4/5/96, Michael Wilson wrote:
>I ran across the following article, and it set me to wondering--did
>Dr. Cohen actually publish on 'computer viruses' before anybody else?
>He continues to use it as the bedrock of his reputation capital, so if
>this pre-dates his 'seminal' article, please let me know.
>
>Included message:
>For Liz Bass or Reg Gale
>Discovery
>9:31 AM Friday, April 5, 1996
>By Lou Dolinar
>
> This is still my favorite computer story.  I'm not saying it was the first
>piece ever written about computer viruses, but I won't say that it isn't.  I
>still have the original, dated  April 16, 1985.  In some ways I wish I hadn't
...

Much work was done in the 70s on "worms," which are related to viruses.
John Shoch (spelling may be wrong) at Xerox PARC developed a "worm" which
propagated from machine to machine, circa 1974 (give or take a year).

John Brunner immortalized this in "The Shockwave Rider," his 1975 novel in
which uber-hacker Nickie Halflinger uses worms to disable Big Brother's
panopticon network.

Having said this, Fred Cohen deserves credit for seriously studying
properties of replicating programs, including viruses. (And I believe he
coined the term virus, and also showed how it differs from a worm.) I will
make no particular claims about how _much_ credit he deserves, as this
seems petty. Nearly all discoveries have precursors, of course.

The work on worms clearly was a precursor. Also, general biological work on
replicating patterns was already going on, and Richard Dawkins' "The
Selfish Gene" had been published in the 1970s (and I believe the work on
replicating information patterns--memes--was important).

His views should be taken on their merits, not on whether or not he was the
first to study viruses or replicating programs in general.

As it happens, I find much of what Fred Cohen writes to be tedious and
repetitive, but not because he has gotten "too much" credit for his early
work.

--Tim May

Boycott "Big Brother Inside" software!
We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, we know that that ain't allowed.
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Timothy C. May              | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
tcmay@got.net  408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
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