IP: Re Tapeworms..

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

> Reply-To: "Julian Dibbell" <jdibbell () yahoo com>
> From: "Julian Dibbell" <jmdibbell () home com>
> To: <farber () cis upenn edu>
> Subject: Re: IP: Tapeworms..
> Date: Wed, 8 Aug 2001 17:38:44 -0500
>
> Dave,
>
> A minor correction to John Shoch's helpful note:
>
> The author of "The Shockwave Rider" is John Brunner (author also of "Stand
> on Zanzibar") and not the eminent psychologist Jerome Bruner.
>
> Might also be worth adding that references to computer "viruses" also
> appeared in science fiction long before they turned up in computer science.
> Physics professor Gregory Benford wrote a short story in the late 60s --
> "The Scarred Man" -- describing a piece of malware he called VIRUS (as I
> recall, though, it functioned more like what we would now call a worm). In
> 1972, David Gerrold's novel "When HARLIE Was One" also talked about an
> infectious "virus" program. It was not until 1983 that Fred Cohen wrote his
> dissertation on what we now refer to, thanks to him, as viruses. Unlike the
> Xerox PARC team, however, Cohen was not as far as I know aware of the
> science-fiction precedent for his terminology.
>
> Julian
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "David Farber" <dave () farber net>
> To: <ip-sub-1 () majordomo pobox com>
> Sent: Tuesday, August 07, 2001 4:10 PM
> Subject: IP: Tapeworms..
>
>
> > > To: "Dave Farber (E-mail)" <dave () farber net>
> > > Cc: "'Dennis Allison'" <allison () shasta Stanford EDU>,
> > >    John Shoch
> > >         <shoch () alloyventures com>
> > > Subject: RE: Seems to me you might comment ...
> > >
> > > Dave,
> > > I suspect you are thinking of the fictional "tapeworms" in Jerome
> Bruner's
> > > Sci-Fi book, "Shockwave Rider" -- autonomous programs which chased each
> > > other through a network.
> > > We explicitly acknowledged this as the inspiration when we originally
> coined
> > > the name "worm" for the actual (and more modest) distributed programs we
> did
> > > at Xerox PARC in the late '70s [Shoch & Hupp, CACM, 3/82].
> > > John Shoch
> > > Alloy Ventures
> >
> >
> >
> > For archives see: http://www.interesting-people.org/



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