Date:         Mon, 16 Sep 1996 09:35:43 -0700
Reply-To: "CYHIST  Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
              Cyberspace" 
Sender: "CYHIST  Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
              Cyberspace" 
From: Akira 
Subject:      viruses in non-sf novels
To: Multiple recipients of list CYHIST 
X-UIDL: 842903750.000

______________________________________________________________________
 Community Memory: Discussion List on the History of Cyberspace
______________________________________________________________________


a bit more recently...

An editor of MacWorld recently published a novel titled "Hard Drive"
which featured an interesting scenario of a virus paralyzing the world
thanks to our incredible interconnectedness these days.  The characters
wouldn't stand up to a light shower, but the concept, if a bit paranoid,
is interesting.

   "An ancient eastern proverb says: I complained because I had no shoes;
    then I met a man who had no feet. For the 90's: I complained because I
    had no PowerMac; then I met a man who used Windows."--Cloyce Sutton
===============================================================================
   Rich "Akira" Pizor     pizor@lclark.edu     http://www.lclark.edu/~pizor
             *** I use PGP -- finger or http for public key ***

______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
            http://www.reach.com/matrix/community-memory.html
         A CPSR Project -- http://www.cpsr.org -- cpsr@cpsr.org
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______________________________________________________________________
Date:         Mon, 16 Sep 1996 11:38:32 -0500
Reply-To: "CYHIST  Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
              Cyberspace" 
Sender: "CYHIST  Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
              Cyberspace" 
From: "David S. Bennahum" 
Subject:      CM> List status, posts.
To: Multiple recipients of list CYHIST 
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I have not received any cyber-history postings for several days now, and,
normally, I would assume this was an accurate reflection of no one posting.
However, for the past five days my Internet Provider (Panix.com) has been
under a sustained and ruthless hacker attack that has shut down mailservers
repeatedly, meaning I may not have received mail.  If you have posted to
CYHIST in the previous 5 days and did not see your post redistributed,
please resend it.

The strange malevolence of this attack, on a service with several thousand
subscribers is a miserable example of electronic vandalism.  The community
of Internet Providers so far has been unable to coordinate in supporting
Panix to effectively hunt down the source of these attacks.  It is an
interesting precedent, a sort of "not in my backyard" attitude whose
consequences we will all share if it becomes prevalent.  Meanwhile, back on
the subject of cyber-history, would someone like to post about their
experiences of being malevolently "cracked", and how they dealt with it?

best,
db
[CM moderator]

PS Those curious about how Panix has dealt with this episode should visit
www.panix.com; the home page has a link to a continuous update on the
situation.

______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
            http://www.reach.com/matrix/community-memory.html
         A CPSR Project -- http://www.cpsr.org -- cpsr@cpsr.org
 Materials may be reposted in their *entirety* for non-commercial use.

 Get this list in digest form:          SET CYHIST DIGEST
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______________________________________________________________________
Date:         Tue, 17 Sep 1996 01:51:14 GMT
Reply-To: "CYHIST  Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
              Cyberspace" 
Sender: "CYHIST  Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
              Cyberspace" 
From: Chris Condon 
Subject:      NetHistory
To: Multiple recipients of list CYHIST 
X-UIDL: 842967123.015

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 Community Memory: Discussion List on the History of Cyberspace
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I just came across the Community Memory list, and thought that the list
members might find my web page of interest. My standard blurb follows:

"NetHistory is a personal, almost informal history of the Internet and BITNET.
The site contains an archive of old documents and newer editorials, as well as
related links.  People can explore the site and discover Internet history in a
new and interesting way."

The page is at http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/2260

(I have added the Community Memory web page to the list of links, by the way).

More to the point, if anyone is interested in contributing content to the site,
I would be more than grateful.  Credit is always given where creit is due.  I
am looking for three things:

1. Archives - I have archives of many old documents and newsletters, but since
my experience was largely with BITNET, I am short on Internet documents. These
can even be what some would call trivial -- for example, I have the archives
of the old NutWorks humor newsletter available on the site.  The point is to
get a sense of what life was like in the early Internet. (By my standards,
"early" means the 80's, though I know the original net is much older than
that).

2. Editorials (for the Voices section). Part of what I'm looking for are
editorials or anecdotes about important events in Internet history. More
importantly, however, I am looking for the "human" side of the early Internet
community:  your personal experiences -- what the early Internet community was
like, and perhaps how it changed your life.

3. Links - If there are any web or gopher links I am missing, please let me
know.


Thank you for your interest and support.


Chris Condon
ccondon@ix.netcom.com

______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
            http://www.reach.com/matrix/community-memory.html
         A CPSR Project -- http://www.cpsr.org -- cpsr@cpsr.org
 Materials may be reposted in their *entirety* for non-commercial use.

 Get this list in digest form:          SET CYHIST DIGEST
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Date:         Tue, 17 Sep 1996 10:40:48 -0700
Reply-To: "CYHIST  Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
              Cyberspace" 
Sender: "CYHIST  Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
              Cyberspace" 
From: Bob Bickford 
Subject:      Fwd: The First Virus?
To: Multiple recipients of list CYHIST 
X-UIDL: 842999918.001

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 Community Memory: Discussion List on the History of Cyberspace
______________________________________________________________________


I've been meaning to send this story to the list for some time, but it was
stored on my 1995 personal backup CD-ROM which was lost when we moved back in
May '96.  Well, I finally found the errant box (unlabelled, of course) and
now I can share this with y'all.  As you can see, it was originally posted to
alt.hackers way back in 1990 so you may have seen it then.  I've left most of
the header lines in for historical sake, although I broke the long ones, and
the article text has been reformatted but otherwise not changed.  I never
heard any more about the paper he talks about....

=====================begin-rab-included-text===============================
>From apple!usc!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!uwm.edu!cs.utexas.edu!rutgers!...
      ...shelby!helens!hanauma!joe Tue Apr  3 02:02:16 PDT 1990
Article 96 of alt.hackers:
Path: well!apple!usc!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!uwm.edu!cs.utexas.edu!...
       ...rutgers!shelby!helens!hanauma!joe
From: joe@hanauma (Joe Dellinger)
Newsgroups: alt.hackers
Subject: A (long) story about an (old) Apple ][ virus
Message-ID: <449@helens.Stanford.EDU>
Date: 31 Mar 90 09:43:08 GMT
Reply-To: joe@hanauma.stanford.edu (Joe Dellinger)
Distribution: alt
Organization: Stanford University, Dept. of Geophysics
Lines: 216


Sorry this article is rather long, but if you still have any old DOS 3.3
Apple ][ disks lying around please read it! (Feel free to read it for general
entertainment value too, of course, even if you don't possess any such
historical disks.)

I have been asked by Gene Spafford to write an article detailing the life
story of a Virus I wrote for Dos 3.3 on the Apple ][ in December, 1981 for
one of his journals. Spafford wants me to write the story up because it's the
earliest _documentable_ personal computer virus he's heard of. I'm trying to
get more information that I plan to use to make that article more complete.

1) Why did I write a virus? Am I an evil scum?

At the time (remember, this was 1981) I was an undergraduate at Texas A+M.
There was an active community of Apple ][ users in my dorm (Shuhmacher), with
an _incredible_ amount of copying of pirated game programs going on. I noted
that most games were damaged in various sorts of ways, but they were almost
always still playable despite the damage. (For example, there was one popular
Star Trek game in BASIC that had occasional garbage control characters in
non-critical REM and PRINT statements; space war games often had random junk
replacing some pictures of ships, etc.) I decided that I could explain this
by invoking a sort of "evolution".

For evolution to occur, you need mutation and natural selection. Well, there
was "mutation" caused by people hacking with the games; more importantly,
many copies of games were also accidentally mangled by sick disks and
computers.  (People would keep using game disks until they literally
disintegrated. My early model Apple ][ was notoriously unreliable, and would
crash about every 30 minutes in all sorts of interesting ways. A few
well-placed bangs would usually get it working again.) "Natural Selection"
entered the picture with the actions of users to either "reproduce" or "kill"
copies of games. (For example, if your copy of a game was not playable, you
would go get a fresh copy of it from your neighbor, reproducing his copy and
killing yours. As there was only a finite amount of disk space for games,
there was also competition between species of programs, too.)

This idea of programs inhabiting a sort of computer biosphere led naturally
to the idea of a "Computer Virus" as a likely accidental outcome of such
evolution. My experiments started when I tried to find out what the minimum
change to DOS was to make it viral. (I was thinking of something like a
prion, a sort of proto-virus that can be created by repeated damage to
plants. A prion can't jump from plant to plant by itself, but it will happily
hitch a ride on your machete if you let it. Supposedly prions are actually
becoming a serious agricultural problem with palm trees in some parts of the
world.) As I remember the answer for DOS 3.3 was about 16 bytes, which was
within the bounds of what could happen naturally if Apple computers with
people randomly copying games between them were to exist for a few million
years! The next logical step was trying to guess what an evolutionarily
OPTIMAL program might look like. Certainly the program would be more
successful if it didn't rely on the good will of humans to reproduce, but
likewise it is a bad idea to damage your host (or give humans a reason to
expend effort trying to kill you). So the ideal virus would spread by itself,
but not cause harm or even any "symptoms" of any kind, if it could help it.

I discussed these ideas with friends, many of whom also had Apple ]['s.  None
of them had ever heard of such a thing as a "computer virus" at the time.
(Many Apple ][ users I knew scoffed at the idea that such a thing could
possibly exist.) Well, by this time creating a virus sounded like a really
interesting project, and it was a good excuse to learn 6502 machine language,
so a group of us started working on my "evolutionarily optimal program" off
and on in our (infrequent) spare time. Our first attempt, "Virus version 1"
was finished in early 1982. Virus 1 was infectious, but still caused some
symptoms on my computer despite our best efforts, so we kept it strictly
quarantined and kept hacking.

A couple months later Virus 2 was finished. It seemed to cause no ill effects
at all, so I proceeded with the next step in my experiments and turned it
loose in my own disks. The goal of this experiment was to see how quickly
such a program would spread through my own disks if I continued using my
computer normally. (So I had another good reason to want to make sure the
virus was completely innocuous. In fact, in the end almost all of Virus 2's
code was to check for various sorts of dangerous situations: non standard
DOS, non standard disks, programs altering DOS, etc. In these cases the virus
would either not attempt infection or immediately disconnect itself from DOS,
committing suicide.)

Interest in my "research" was high among the Apple community at A+M, so I
also gave copies of Virus 2 to several friends who wanted to play with it.
The idea of computer viruses spread rapidly; several other people started
working on their own "less boring" (read damaging) ones. Fortunately (as far
as I ever knew) they spent all of their time trying to dream up interesting
pranks for the virus to pull, instead of determinedly trying to produce a
working "evil" virus.

2) Did my virus ever escape?

At first we carefully kept Virus 2 quarantined, but after a few months with
no damaging symptoms we got a little lax, and the inevitable happened. I
first found out Virus 2 had escaped when one of my A+M friends who had
graduated and moved on to grad school at UIUC reported that everybody's copy
of a (pirated) game called "Congo" had mysteriously stopped working there.
Whenever people tried to get a fresh working copy, they would find that
previously working copies would then also stop working. My friend realized
what had happened and wrote me about it. We quickly wrote an "immunizer"
program and distributed it at UIUC; the standard Apple utility "master
create" sufficed as a disinfectant. We were never quite sure whether _all_
escaped copies of Virus 2 at UIUC were killed off, though.

I was disappointed that Virus 2 was a failure, and started work on Virus 3.
It turned out that Virus 2 caused problems because it made DOS 1 sector (256
bytes! a significant chunk of memory!) larger, to accomodate the extra code.
A very few programs would blow up in strange ways because of this. (The
solution was simply to boot from a noninfected disk, and THEN run the
programs.) So the goal for Virus 3 was that it should take up no room in
memory, and no room on disk. After some thought, we came up with a solution:
Most of Virus 3's guts resided in unprotected memory where they could be
freely written over. A small routine buried safely inside holes in DOS's
Read-Write Translate Table triple-checked the unprotected code before jumping
to it. (This code was a real nightmare; some bytes in the table served double
duty as critical data values for DOS and executable op codes for the virus.)
Virus 3 was a success; we never encountered any program whose behaviour was
affected by the virus's presence.

The worst part about writing a DOS virus was that whenever I made a mistake
DOS would stop working, and I'd have to re-poke the bytes in by hand, which I
kept written down on pieces of junk mail! Using an assembler was out of the
question, as the whole thing was only about 300 bytes and scattered in tiny
bits and pieces in several places in DOS. It had lots of JMPs all over the
place, self-modifying code and other such nightmares, all to make it as small
as possible. (The larger it was and the more exposed in memory, the more work
it was to replicate itself and the more chance there was of something
unexpected going wrong.)

3) What finally happened?

Well, I don't really know. Since Virus 3 was effectively completely
invisible, after a while we lost interest and pretty much forgot about the
whole thing. We again intended to keep the virus quarantined, but a spot
check in the fall of 1983 shortly after I graduated and moved to Stanford
turned it up in several of my friends' collections on disks they thought were
uninfected.  By that point they didn't think it was worth the bother of
removing it, though, so it spread unchecked. Interest in viruses at A+M had
died down by this time, too. I only heard about my virus once more: around
1984 my friend at UIUC reported that an "evil" virus was attacking Apples
there, and causing a lot of damage by randomly initializing disks. Some disks
had a form of immunity to the evil virus, however: when infected by the evil
virus, they would crash at boot time (which was better than appearing to boot
normally and then causing damage later). It turned out the "immune" disks
were ones that had previously been infected by Virus 3!

>>>>>>>> Here's where I need your help: <<<<<<<<<<

4) Does it still exist?

That's what I'd like to find out. The Virus wasn't particularly infectious;
it only spread on "CATALOG" commands. It attached itself only to DOS, not
programs, and was very careful only to attach itself to absolutely vanilla
48K slave DOS 3.3. Still, there are some old DOS 3.3 disks out there yet,
aren't there?

If you would like to look for it, here's where in memory to look:

beginning at B6E8 regular DOS 3.3 has a bunch of 00's. Boot the disk you want
to check to load that disk's copy of DOS into memory. Infected disks or
non-infectious descendants of infected disks will have text of the form

"(GEN 0000000 TAMU)"

(in Hex this is "A8 C7 C5 CE A0 B0 B0 B0 B0 B0 B0 B0 A0 D4 C1 CD D5 A9")

at B6E8. You can also see this text go by near the end of track 0, sector 0
if you use some utility to dump your disk as text. The number is a generation
count, and so will be different in your copy. (13 generations saturated my
own and my friends' collections, if you're interested.) If you should find
the generation count, you might try also looking at 9CFE and 9CFF. If the
virus is alive, this should contain the initials of the friend of mine who
let your copy of the virus escape. (If it's JD, then I'm the guilty party.)

Hopefully Virus 2 was wiped out, but perhaps it wasn't. If you want to check
the version, the simplest way is to do a "CATALOG" of the disk you're
checking, and then look at B3BF. Vanilla DOS 3.3 has a "00" at this
location.  Virus 2 instead has 02, and Virus 3 similarly has 03. (This
"immunity" byte can spread when a new disk is initialized, thus providing a
way for immunity to be created and passed on. For example, if a master disk
is attacked it will be left marked immune but will be free of infection.
Slave disks initialized off the master disk would then also be immune, even
though they would otherwise be susceptible.)

(If you don't find zeros at B6E8, 9CFE, and B3BF, but also don't find the
bytes I've mentioned, then I don't know any more about it than you do, and
there's not much point in getting excited and flaming me via e-mail.)

If you DO find my virus on one of your old Apple ][ disks, please let me
know! It will make the paper much more interesting! I'll acknowledge you at
the end! (And please accept my apologies!)

5) Did the idea of Viruses I started spread or die out?

Certainly everybody knows about viruses today. Did you hear rumors of some
strange person at A+M working on one around 1982-1983? (And no, I was NOT the
person who was expelled from A+M about that time for breaking into the
mainframe and stealing Chemistry exams. I never kept my activities secret,
nor did anything I thought I had to keep secret. For example, my virus is
mentioned in a "Computer Recreations" column in 1986, but the author of that
article mangled the information I sent him rather badly.)

Do you know anything about the people who were breaking and distributing the
copy-protected software turning up at A+M? The rumors at the time at A+M were
that the software was coming "from Chicago".  Many programs were "signed" by
the breakers with such psuedonyms as "The Jerk", "The Beaver", and "Apple
Pirated Program Library Exchange".

Do you know anything about what happened at A+M after spring, 1983, after I
graduated? I was told by one A+M graduate I met in 1989 that Virus 3 made it
into the A+M Computer User's Group's disks after I left, but I don't really
know that.

6) Any other early virus-writers have any interesting stories to confess?

I'd be curious to hear if anybody else tried to write a virus before they
became commonplace and criminal. Surely the idea must have occurred to many
other people about that time!

\    /\    /\    /\/\/\/\/\/\/\.-.-.-.-.......___________
 \  /  \  /  \  /Dept of Geophysics, Stanford University \/\/\.-.-....___
  \/    \/    \/Joe Dellinger joe@hanauma.stanford.edu  apple!hanauma!joe\/\.-.
************** Drive Friendly, Y'all! *****************************************
======================end-rab-included-text================================
--
  Robert Bickford          rab@well.com
  http://www.well.com/user/rab/

______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
            http://www.reach.com/matrix/community-memory.html
         A CPSR Project -- http://www.cpsr.org -- cpsr@cpsr.org
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______________________________________________________________________
Date:         Wed, 18 Sep 1996 20:53:39 -0400
Reply-To: "CYHIST  Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
              Cyberspace" 
Sender: "CYHIST  Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
              Cyberspace" 
From: OLmaniac@aol.com
Subject:      Re: viruses in non-sf novels
To: Multiple recipients of list CYHIST 
X-UIDL: 843578546.000

______________________________________________________________________
 Community Memory: Discussion List on the History of Cyberspace
______________________________________________________________________


In a message dated 96-09-16 14:03:57 EDT, you write:

<<  "An ancient eastern proverb says: I complained because I had no shoes;
     then I met a man who had no feet. For the 90's: I complained because I
     had no PowerMac; then I met a man who used Windows."--Cloyce Sutton >>


    The rivalry between Mac and Windows is well known, is there any rivalry
between other systems manufacturers that predates this?














                                                                       Robert
J. Smith

______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
            http://www.reach.com/matrix/community-memory.html
         A CPSR Project -- http://www.cpsr.org -- cpsr@cpsr.org
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Date:         Tue, 24 Sep 1996 16:15:38 -0500
Reply-To: "CYHIST  Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
              Cyberspace" 
Sender: "CYHIST  Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
              Cyberspace" 
From: Marsha Woodbury 
Subject:      CM> The things people will trade.
To: Multiple recipients of list CYHIST 
X-UIDL: 843660462.000

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 Community Memory: Discussion List on the History of Cyberspace
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for the community memory list:

Date: Tue, 24 Sep 1996 10:59:58 -0700 (PDT)
From: Travis Linn 
X-Sender: linn@equinox
To: Marsha Woodbury 
Subject: ad
MIME-Version: 1.0
Status:

~~~~~~


Trade Univac 3 computer, aprx
wgt 25 tons, stored on 40' semi
since '75, for collectible car or
late mdl P/U. XXX-XXXX lv msg.

~~~~~~~

Marsha Woodbury, Ph.D.        Director of Information Technology
Graduate School of Library and Information Science   UIUC
Chair, CPSR           http://alexia.lis.uiuc.edu/~woodbury/
Work: 217- 244-4643      FAX: 217- 244-3302     marsha-w@uiuc.edu

CPSR's Annual Meeting and Conference, "Communications Unleashed"
will be held Oct 19-20 at Georgetown University in
Washington DC. For information or to register, see http://www.cpsr.org
or e-mail cpsrannmtg@cpsr.org

______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
            http://www.reach.com/matrix/community-memory.html
         A CPSR Project -- http://www.cpsr.org -- cpsr@cpsr.org
 Materials may be reposted in their *entirety* for non-commercial use.

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Date:         Tue, 24 Sep 1996 16:31:47 EST
Reply-To: "CYHIST  Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
              Cyberspace" 
Sender: "CYHIST  Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
              Cyberspace" 
From: "Rob Slade, doting grandpa of Ryan & Trevor"
              
Subject:      Re: viruses in non-sf novels
To: Multiple recipients of list CYHIST 
X-UIDL: 843658433.020

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 Community Memory: Discussion List on the History of Cyberspace
______________________________________________________________________


From: OLmaniac@aol.com

>    The rivalry between Mac and Windows is well known, is there any rivalry
>between other systems manufacturers that predates this?

Oh, I remember some pretty good rows between rival gangs of Apple ][
users and Commodore Pet devotees  :-)  That was primarily in the public
school system of the day.  Then there were the "glass house" people versus
those who had the new "minicomputers".  And one still finds books from
authors arguing that "their" early computers were the first "real"
computers  :-)

======================
roberts@decus.ca         rslade@vcn.bc.ca         slade@freenet.victoria.bc.ca
link to virus, book info at http://www.freenet.victoria.bc.ca/techrev/rms.html
Author "Robert Slade's Guide to Computer Viruses" 0-387-94663-2 (800-SPRINGER)

______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
            http://www.reach.com/matrix/community-memory.html
         A CPSR Project -- http://www.cpsr.org -- cpsr@cpsr.org
 Materials may be reposted in their *entirety* for non-commercial use.

 Get this list in digest form:          SET CYHIST DIGEST
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Date:         Wed, 25 Sep 1996 08:06:59 EDT
Reply-To: "CYHIST  Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
              Cyberspace" 
Sender: "CYHIST  Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
              Cyberspace" 
From: keith reid-green 
Subject:      Re: viruses in non-sf novels
To: Multiple recipients of list CYHIST 
X-UIDL: 843659861.000

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 Community Memory: Discussion List on the History of Cyberspace
______________________________________________________________________


From: OLmaniac@aol.com

>    The rivalry between Mac and Windows is well known, is there any
rivalry
>between other systems manufacturers that predates this?

Well, there was the original rivalry: IBM vs. Everybody Else.  In the late
50's IBM had over 90% of the computer biz, and the others tried to fill
niche markets, e.g., DEC (small computers) CDC (big computers) Burroughs
(commercial computers) and so forth.

Keith Reid-Green
Princeton, NJ
KReid-Green@ets.org

______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
            http://www.reach.com/matrix/community-memory.html
         A CPSR Project -- http://www.cpsr.org -- cpsr@cpsr.org
 Materials may be reposted in their *entirety* for non-commercial use.

 Get this list in digest form:          SET CYHIST DIGEST
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Date:         Wed, 25 Sep 1996 08:25:32 -0500
Reply-To: "CYHIST  Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
              Cyberspace" 
Sender: "CYHIST  Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
              Cyberspace" 
From: Peter da Silva 
Subject:      Re: viruses in non-sf novels
To: Multiple recipients of list CYHIST 
X-UIDL: 843660399.000

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 Community Memory: Discussion List on the History of Cyberspace
______________________________________________________________________


> Oh, I remember some pretty good rows between rival gangs of Apple ][
> users and Commodore Pet devotees  :-)

The big rows I recall were between the Apple users and the TRS-80 users.

______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
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______________________________________________________________________
Date:         Wed, 25 Sep 1996 10:19:30 -0400
Reply-To: "CYHIST  Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
              Cyberspace" 
Sender: "CYHIST  Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
              Cyberspace" 
From: "christopher f. chiesa" 
Subject:      Re: CYHIST Digest - 17 Sep 1996 to 24 Sep 1996
To: Multiple recipients of list CYHIST 
X-UIDL: 843662732.000

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I hope this gets to the list proper; I've been "forced" to change to a
less functional mailer than I've been using before this.

In a message dated 96-09-16 14:03:57 EDT, OLmaniac@aol.com
(Robert J. Smith) writes:

>     The rivalry between Mac and Windows is well known, is there any rivalry
> between other systems manufacturers that predates this?

Oh, heavens, yes.  Rivalry between computer systems seems to be -- no,
I'll go out on a limb here and say "is" -- as old as computing itself!
In fact, it is SO well known that it's actually a cliche' among even
moderately-experienced computer users.  It is SO common for rivalries
to break out between fans-and-followers of various brands,
architectures, machines, OS's, utility programs, software tools,
networking protocols, etc. etc. etc., and it is so common for the
resulting discussions to "break down" into fact-ignoring, name-calling,
mud-slinging, pointless, all-out BICKERING, that the whole phenomenon
has earned the snide label, "religious wars."  Most people seem to go
through an initial stage of vigorous participation in the wars, then (if
they're wise) to mature.  Thereafter, they consider participation in
such things "a waste of time," but the wars never die out because
there's a never-ending supply of fanatical newbies always coming up from
below.

My personal experience includes observing, in reverse chronological
order, the following phases of the eternal religious war:

   - Late 80s to present: Windows (well, IBM-PC in general)-vs-Macintosh;
     participants are those left standing after the weeding-out
     of less-successful brands of "second-generation" home/personal
     computers; war is conducted on the Internet as you know it, and
     on many of the BBSes and "online services" connected (or not!)
     to the Internet.

   - Mid-to-late-80s: "Open competition" phase of second-generation
     home/personal computer market; participants include Macintosh,
     Atari ST, Amiga, and improved IBM-PC (in numerous "clone" forms)
     -- i.e., descendants of survivors of FIRST-generation weeding-out
     process simultaneously, VMS-vs-Unix in minicomputer market, and
     VMS-vs-VM/CMS in mainframe market -- rivalries, but not quite "wars,"
     due to generally older and more-mature user community; war is
     conducted on remaining single-user BBSes, first multi-user BBSes and
     up-and-coming but still rudimentary Internet and independent "online
     services."

   - Early to mid-80s: Atari 800 vs. Commodore 64 with small Apple II
     contingent still hanging on, and late-entering IBM-PC; all
     but PC are survivors of weeding-out of first generation of
     consumer-product-type "home/personal" computer market; war is
     conducted on single-user BBSes and, informally, offline between
     individuals, user groups and clubs.

   - Late 70's to early 80s: Atari 800, Commodore 64, Apple II,
     Radio Shack TRS-80, Texas Instruments TI-99/4a, and numerous
     other brands you've never heard of -- IBM-PC introduced in
     1981 to "so-what" reaction among fans of just-listed machines;
     war is conducted primarily "offline," between individuals,
     machine-specific user-groups and clubs; "advanced" individuals
     and clubs begin to operate/use single-user Bulletin Board
     Systems (BBSes) and discover their Message Bases make an
     ideal field for conducting the "computer wars."

It occurs to me that MOST of the "wars" I'VE witnessed have been conducted
by YOUNG people -- kids, in short -- and that adults generally have kept
their inter-system rivalries dignified, objective, and tasteful for the
most part.  I wasn't involved in the "adult"-level interactions, myself,
until around 1985 or so.

I also wasn't involved in ANY kind of computing much before the very late
70's, but I'm SURE there were rivalries (probably of the more-dignified
type, given that computers were primarily accessible only to a "select
few," i.e. those who had been around long enough to get into university
and industry environments, and were therefore more mature when they
STARTED using computers) going back a lot further.  You might find it
useful to read some of the "history of computing/the Internet/etc." books
that have been appearing the last ten years or so.

Chris Chiesa
  lvt-cfc@servtech.com

______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
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______________________________________________________________________
Date:         Wed, 25 Sep 1996 14:22:34 GMT
Reply-To: "CYHIST  Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
              Cyberspace" 
Sender: "CYHIST  Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
              Cyberspace" 
From: Chris Condon 
Subject:      Re: CYHIST Digest - 17 Sep 1996 to 24 Sep 1996
To: Multiple recipients of list CYHIST 
X-UIDL: 843659743.003

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Robert J. Smith  wrote:

>     The rivalry between Mac and Windows is well known, is there any rivalry
> between other systems manufacturers that predates this?

The big rivalry of the 70's and early 80's was between IBM and DEC (and to some
extent, between IBM and everybody else).  The last big push I recall was in the
early 80's when DEC was advertising "Digital has it now." -- a thinly disguised
shot at what we would now call IBM's vaporware.  They had that slogan painted
everywhere -- even on the sides of 18-wheelers.

IBM's strengths were always in the business and financial sectors, where DEC
thrived in the educational and scientific communities. DEC was *always* trying
to get a bigger slice of that corporate pie, but IBM was firmly entrenched.

It's actually very similar to the current Microsoft situation, because business
application developers wrote their software for the dominant platform -- in
this case IBMs.  It would seem that Microsoft has taken a page or two out of
IBM's playbook.

The other rivalry I can think of is "Unix vs. everybody else" but that has been
going on since the beginning of time...


Chris Condon
ccondon@ix.netcom.com

______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
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Date:         Wed, 25 Sep 1996 09:32:18 -0500
Reply-To: "CYHIST  Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
              Cyberspace" 
Sender: "CYHIST  Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
              Cyberspace" 
From: Peter da Silva 
Subject:      Re: CYHIST Digest - 17 Sep 1996 to 24 Sep 1996
To: Multiple recipients of list CYHIST 
X-UIDL: 843746132.002

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> The other rivalry I can think of is "Unix vs. everybody else" but that has
> been going on since the beginning of time...

Not quite. Time began at Midnight 31 Dec 1969 GMT, but there really wasn't
any big UNIX push until the late '70s.

______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
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Date:         Wed, 25 Sep 1996 10:10:31 -0600
Reply-To: "CYHIST  Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
              Cyberspace" 
Sender: "CYHIST  Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
              Cyberspace" 
From: Trevor Holyoak 
Subject:      Re: Computer Rivalry
To: Multiple recipients of list CYHIST 
X-UIDL: 843702435.004

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There used to be some rivalry between users of Atari & Apple. I
remember a program called (if I remember right) Apple Kill. The Atari logo
(fuji) would attack the Apple logo and hack it to pieces. It was very
amusing.

- Trevor Holyoak

______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
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Date:         Wed, 25 Sep 1996 20:03:36 -0400
Reply-To: "CYHIST  Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
              Cyberspace" 
Sender: "CYHIST  Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
              Cyberspace" 
From: "Jeremy C. Radwan" 
Subject:      Re: viruses in non-sf novels
To: Multiple recipients of list CYHIST 
X-UIDL: 843702435.005

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>Oh, I remember some pretty good rows between rival gangs of Apple ][
>users and Commodore Pet devotees

Having owned an Atari 800XL computer and frequenting the BBS
scene, I remember the rivalry between the Atari owners and the
"Commies," those who had the competing Commodore 64.

Most of it was good fun, although it did get out of hand sometimes
(ie. Atari users calling C64 boards and starting flame wars, etc.)

Jeremy

---
Jeremy C. Radwan, Price Waterhouse MCS - Midwest Region
Voice mail : (216) 781-3700          Internet   : jradwan@cris.com
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______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
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Date:         Wed, 25 Sep 1996 20:03:42 -0400
Reply-To: "CYHIST  Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
              Cyberspace" 
Sender: "CYHIST  Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
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From: "Jeremy C. Radwan" 
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X-UIDL: 843702435.006

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At 10:19 AM 9/25/96 -0400, you wrote:

>   - Early to mid-80s: Atari 800 vs. Commodore 64 with small Apple II
>     contingent still hanging on, and late-entering IBM-PC; all
>     but PC are survivors of weeding-out of first generation of
>     consumer-product-type "home/personal" computer market; war is
>     conducted on single-user BBSes and, informally, offline between
>     individuals, user groups and clubs.

Ah, again, being an Atari 800 owner, I remember other Atari
owners telling a former owner he had "sold out" when he
"broke down" and bought an IBM-PC. We thought that ANSI colors
on a BBS would never replace ATASCII (Atari's ASCII codes and
graphics).

Jeremy


---
Jeremy C. Radwan, Price Waterhouse MCS - Midwest Region
Voice mail : (216) 781-3700          Internet   : jradwan@cris.com
Client site: (800) 372-3555 x6084    Lotus Notes: Jeremy_Radwan@notes.pw.com
http://www.concentric.net/~jradwan/

______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
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Date:         Thu, 26 Sep 1996 17:36:32 +0100
Reply-To: "CYHIST  Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
              Cyberspace" 
Sender: "CYHIST  Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
              Cyberspace" 
From: Ross 
Subject:      Re: viruses in non-sf novels
To: Multiple recipients of list CYHIST 
X-UIDL: 843762068.000

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>> The rivalry between Mac and Windows is well known, is there any
>> rivalry between other systems manufacturers that predates this?
>
> Well, there was the original rivalry: IBM vs. Everybody Else.  In the late
> 50's IBM had over 90% of the computer biz, and the others tried to fill
> niche markets, e.g., DEC (small computers) CDC (big computers) Burroughs
> (commercial computers) and so forth.
>
> Keith Reid-Green
> Princeton, NJ

I don't think this was really true in the late 1950s, i.e. *before*
IBM was delivering System/360. I guess that Flamm's books are probably
the first port of call to look into the details. Also, DEC didn't
really become a significant force until well into the 1960s.

Ob-virus-point: I read in John Markoff's "Cyberpunk" that the Internet
Worm was so called, rather than the Internet Virus, because people
claimed that a virus had to be a parasite attached to a program. I
don't understand why a parasite resident in the computer's memory
shouldn't be considered a virus regardless of whether it got there
through being attached to a program. Can anyone suggest *who* insisted
that it should be called a worm, and give a better explanation?

Cheerio,
Ross

.-------Ross Hamilton, PhD Student in the History of Computing-------.
| http://www.dcs.warwick.ac.uk/~ross | mailto:ross@dcs.warwick.ac.uk |
|    Department of Computer Science, | 12 Newbold Place, Leamington  |
| Uni. of Warwick, Coventry, CV4 7AL | Spa, Warwks, CV32 4HR, UK     |
`-------------- Office: 01203 528043 | Home: 01926 886146 -----------'

______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
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Date:         Thu, 26 Sep 1996 09:54:36 -0700
Reply-To: "CYHIST  Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
              Cyberspace" 
Sender: "CYHIST  Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
              Cyberspace" 
From: "Kip Crosby, CHAC" 
Subject:      CM> Computer rivalry
To: Multiple recipients of list CYHIST 
X-UIDL: 843762068.001

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How about Macintosh vs. Atari ST?  That one was hot enough to burn your
fingers and one big weapon in it was the fact that on the ST one could get
color video/color monitor from the very beginning, whereas on the Mac, of
course, not.  Also, when Atari built far-out machines like the STacy,
Atarians would jeer that Apple had no equivalent.  In the fullness of time
it is conceded that Apple enjoyed superior engineering -- though not always
superior construction -- but the Atari boxes had a certain renegade
feistiness that faintly persists even today.  If I had room for a fourth (or
probably fifth) computer in this closet, I'd love to have a TT030 or Falcon
to sit next to my SE/30.

It must be noted that the Mac/ST war was completely distinct from Apple ][
vs. Atari 800/1300XL/whatever.
__________________________________________
Kip Crosby                 engine@chac.org
      http://www.chac.org/index.html
Computer History Association of California

______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
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Date:         Thu, 26 Sep 1996 13:28:59 EDT
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Comments:     Converted from OV/VM to RFC822 format by PUMP V2.2X
From: Paul Ceruzzi 
Subject:      CM> Windows vs. Mac "wars"
To: Multiple recipients of list CYHIST 
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Back in the late 1970s there was a battle betwen users of HP vs. TI
pocket calculators. Actually, it was between the Reverse-Polish Notation
and Algebraic Entry. (A few companies besides HP also made RPN but it
was mostly HP). Needless to say, I have never owned, nor will I ever
own, an algebraic calculator. (Not true strictly speaking, as the one I
use now, an HP 17B-II, allows you to go either way, although I've never
used it algebraically). There was even a t-shirt that said RPN>=. HP
users definitely felt superior--still do! Sadly, HP seems to be easing
very slowly away from RPN: each year fewer and fewer of their products
come with it. And of course the world has since moved on--at that time
pocket calculators were one of the few ways to get computing power on a
personal level...

______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
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Date:         Thu, 26 Sep 1996 11:55:38 -0600
Reply-To: "CYHIST  Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
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Sender: "CYHIST  Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
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From: Scott McNulty 
Subject:      CM> Computer Rivalry.
To: Multiple recipients of list CYHIST 
X-Status: 
X-UIDL: 843832792.004
Status: RO

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>                       ...It is SO common for rivalries
>to break out between fans-and-followers of various brands,
>architectures, machines, OS's, utility programs, software tools,
>networking protocols, etc. etc. etc., ...

Yes, let's not forget the rivalries between users of different computer
languages as well.  "Ya ain't a real programmer unless you do it in [fill in
favorite computer language]".



thx scottm.
scottm@carl.org
-------------
 "Y'all are hurting my tender ears.  I would appreciate it if
  y'all would scream one at a time."
   -- House Speaker John Alario, D-Westwego, Louisiana.

______________________________________________________________________
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Date:         Thu, 26 Sep 1996 15:32:50 -0400
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From: Bill_von_Hagen@transarc.com
Subject:      Re: CM> Computer rivalry
To: Multiple recipients of list CYHIST 
X-UIDL: 843832792.029

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"Kip Crosby, CHAC"  writes:
>
> How about Macintosh vs. Atari ST?  That one was hot enough to burn your
> fingers and one big weapon in it was the fact that on the ST one could get
> color video/color monitor from the very beginning, whereas on the Mac, of
> course, not.... [More text deleted - this here for context]

The Mac vs. ST rivalry wasn't quite as intense as the ST vs. Amiga
controversy, since the latter two machines were essentially fighting
for the same customer base (cool machines with neat but
individualistic GUIs). This is a gross simplification, of course -
there were many other differences. The STs used GEM for the interface,
while the Amigas had a real, multi-tasking OS. Both had great color
support at the time that the Mac was a dedicated B&W machine.

This particular rivalry was especially interesting for two primary
reasons: the common, anti-Mac/anti-Windows ground that both camps
could agree on, and also because this could be seen as a direct
descendant of the C64 vs. Atari 800 flame wars.  It was common to see
Atari people starting flame wars on comp.sys.amiga (?) and the Amiga
folks sending inflammatory "your machine sucks" posts on
comp.sys.atari.st (?).

I was an ST owner at the time (and still am, along with 80-90 other
types of machines - including an Amiga), and remember the release of
Dave Small's Magic Sac as the most impressive bit of hardware/software
I had seen to date. This was a small cartridge that plugged into the
ST cartridge port. Add some 64K Macintosh ROMs, run the software, and
your ST turned into a Mac! The ads touted the fact that the Mac
"emulation" (I put this in quotes since you were really running off
the Mac ROMs) took advantage of the larger ST screen, so you actually
got "a Mac that was better than a Mac" (at the time - this was when
the SE/30 was the sexiest Mac you could buy).  The only big kludge was
that the ST disk controller couldn't read the gonzo Mac disks, and so
you had to translate/clone your Mac disks into "Magic Sac format." A
board was later available for the Amiga that provided the same sort of
thing - on the Atari side, Dave Small moved to another company and put
out an improved Magic Sac (with another name) that used 128K Mac ROMs
and could actually read Mac disks directly. This was the collest
attempt at stealing market share that I have ever seen: "buy our
machiine and some extra hardware and you essentially get our
competitor's machine for free."

Another interesting tidbit about this rivalry is that both machines
survived for quite a while (and enhanced hardware releases) due to the
orthogonal I/O support they featured.  The ST (and later the Stacey,
TT, falcon, etc.) was quite a hit in musical circles because it came
with MIDI ports. The Amiga provided direct support for video, so was a
big hit with local cable channels, serious video artists, etc - even
before the Video Toaster came out, which probably one of the coolest
peripherals of all time.  After the VT came out, the sky was the
limit.

One of my favorite in/nerd-jokes of all time is the time that I was
channel surfing on local cable and came across a local channel station
broadcasting a "Guru Meditation" screen. This meant that the Amiga
that was running the station's video had crashed, but no-one had
noticed yet - much like broadcasting a Windows GPF screen. I still
haven't quite been able to explain to my wife why I found that so
hilarious!

  Bill

PS: Check out http://www.city-net.com for a list of other machines that
    I've accumulated over the years. I'm looking for more!

______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
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Date:         Thu, 26 Sep 1996 16:22:24 -0500
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From: Peter da Silva 
Subject:      Re: viruses in non-sf novels
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> I don't understand why a parasite resident in the computer's memory
> shouldn't be considered a virus regardless of whether it got there
> through being attached to a program. Can anyone suggest *who* insisted
> that it should be called a worm, and give a better explanation?

The original difference between a virus and other forms of computer life is
that like a biological virus, it's not a complete life form, but rather
attaches itself to a complete cell (program) and usurps its machinery to
reproduce.

This distinction didn't last long in the general media since boot infectors
throw it for a loop. Of course pure boot infectors don't reproduce very fast
any more because nobody boots off floppies any more, so any successful boot
infector has to have a conventional virus stage as well. There are, however,
a few pure boot infectors and they're still called viruses.

The other difference is that a virus has a permanent state on the system: it
infects the system and stays around through reboots. The worm broke into
systems and lived there, but it didn't survive rebooting the computer...
that is the computer was subverted, but not infected.

______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
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Date:         Thu, 26 Sep 1996 17:53:43 -0400
Reply-To: "CYHIST  Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
              Cyberspace" 
Sender: "CYHIST  Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
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From: "A. Padgett Peterson P.E. Information Security"
              
Subject:      Re: Wars
To: Multiple recipients of list CYHIST 
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  >Back in the late 1970s there was a battle betwen users of HP vs. TI
  >pocket calculators. Actually, it was between the Reverse-Polish Notation
  >and Algebraic Entry.

  The true source of the war was between the HP-35 (the first real
  scientific hand-held calculator) introduced at $395 (1972 ?) and the
  slightly later TI SR-50 for $150. The basis was in the lack of memories
  or nesting since the stack arrangement of the HP permitted easy chaining
  and a pseudo-nest mechanism that most of the algebraic systems of the
  time lacked. While complex math could be done with a single memory, it
  was not always simple.

  For that matter I believe that the first true nesting hand scientific
  was the Commodore 1400 scientific (1973 ?) which was the first I ever
  saw that included parentheses (nine levels AFAIR). LED, $99.00.

  But for the real computer person there was only one: the TI Programmer
  originally LED, later LCD with binary, octal, & hex (integer only but
  boolean operation capable) and decimal (with fractions).

                                        Warmly,
                                                Padgett

______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
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Date:         Thu, 26 Sep 1996 17:52:28 -0500
Reply-To: "CYHIST  Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
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From: Peter da Silva 
Subject:      Re: CM> Windows vs. Mac "wars"
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That T-shirt read:


                [ Enter ] [ > ] [ = ]

(pretend those are all buttons)

I had both TI and HP calculators. I liked the idea of RPN but HP's
stack was too damn short, and the TI programmable calculators were
about ten times as fast. On the other hand, the TI ones tended to
break if you looked at them funny. On the gripping hand you could
buy three TIs for the price of a nominally equivalent HP.

I used 'em both.

______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
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Date:         Thu, 26 Sep 1996 20:20:06 EST
Reply-To: "CYHIST  Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
              Cyberspace" 
Sender: "CYHIST  Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
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From: "Rob Slade, doting grandpa of Ryan & Trevor"
              
Subject:      Re: viruses in non-sf novels
To: Multiple recipients of list CYHIST 
X-UIDL: 843834265.000

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From: Ross 

>Ob-virus-point: I read in John Markoff's "Cyberpunk" that the Internet
>Worm was so called, rather than the Internet Virus, because people
>claimed that a virus had to be a parasite attached to a program. I
>don't understand why a parasite resident in the computer's memory
>shouldn't be considered a virus regardless of whether it got there
>through being attached to a program. Can anyone suggest *who* insisted
>that it should be called a worm, and give a better explanation?

Coming up with a definition of a computer virus is as touchy as coming
up with a definition of artificial intelligence.  The one person who
really has come up with such a definition is Fred Cohen, and his
definition is a mathematical one.

(Nobody, please, quote back to me the VIRUS-L FAQ definition.  I am
part of the group that wrote it, and we can spend months arguing about
what a "program" is.)

A fairly common attempt to translate Fred's definition from math into
English states that a virus "modifies a program" (to include a [possibly
evolved] copy of itself etc. etc.)  Therefore, the Internet thingee,
which did not modify any existing programs, must not have been a virus.
Therefore, it must be ... a worm!  I tend to think this is a distinction
without a difference.  (If you subscribe to the "it can't be a virus
because it doesn't modify programs" school of thought, then Word macro
viruses are not viruses either: the Word documents that get infected
and act as vectors are not programs until they are turned into templates
by the infection.)

As to where the term "worm" came from, there appear to be two very
different, but somewhat complementary, origins.  The earlier appears
to be a derived reference from rogue programs which did "wormhole"
damage to programs and data when they ran out of bounds and started
performing random operations.  The second, though probably stronger,
is that Shoch and Hupp, when experimenting with distributed processing
and what might be called an early attempt at a "good" virus, called their
segmented program a worm.  (Hence the "Xerox worm".)

In short, then: Ross, I agree with you.  And I don't think this
explanation is particularly any better.

======================
roberts@decus.ca         rslade@vcn.bc.ca         slade@freenet.victoria.bc.ca
link to virus, book info at http://www.freenet.victoria.bc.ca/techrev/rms.html
Author "Robert Slade's Guide to Computer Viruses" 0-387-94663-2 (800-SPRINGER)

______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
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Date:         Fri, 27 Sep 1996 08:18:25 -0500
Reply-To: "CYHIST  Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
              Cyberspace" 
Sender: "CYHIST  Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
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From: Peter da Silva 
Subject:      Re: CM> Computer rivalry
To: Multiple recipients of list CYHIST 
X-UIDL: 843842153.000

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> This particular rivalry was especially interesting for two primary
> reasons: the common, anti-Mac/anti-Windows ground that both camps
> could agree on, and also because this could be seen as a direct
> descendant of the C64 vs. Atari 800 flame wars.  It was common to see
> Atari people starting flame wars on comp.sys.amiga (?) and the Amiga
> folks sending inflammatory "your machine sucks" posts on
> comp.sys.atari.st (?).

The other thing that was weird about the Amiga/ST war was that the Amiga
was developed by the people who designed the Atari 800, and the Atari ST
was developed under the leadership of the man who was responsible for the
Commodore 64. I was an Atari owner who briefly had an ST then followed
Jay Miner and the other cool Atari 800 dudes to the Commodore camp.

This was the eventual downfall of both machines, as Jack Tramiel sucked
away Commodore's and Atari's resources in a long drawn out lawsuit over
the Amiga purchase (which rumor has it Jack had originally initiated when
he was at Commodore). *sigh* Politics sucks.

I can't think of any combination of great equipment utterly destroyed by
corporate politics quite as bizzarre as that, at least not in the computer
world... but I could be wrong. Who wants to play "let's top that" on this
one?

PS: The Amiga didn't need a MIDI port, the Amiga serial port supported MIDI
    speeds directly. Nyaaaah. Phhht. Yar boo sucks. Lamer. Ect ect ect...

______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
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Date:         Fri, 27 Sep 1996 10:25:57 -0500
Reply-To: "CYHIST  Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
              Cyberspace" 
Sender: "CYHIST  Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
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From: Peter da Silva 
Subject:      Re: viruses in non-sf novels
To: Multiple recipients of list CYHIST 
X-UIDL: 843842274.003

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> As to where the term "worm" came from, there appear to be two very
> different, but somewhat complementary, origins.

I don't know if the original usage came from Shockwave Rider, but I
started using it because it sounded like a reference to the "worms"
in that book. And it's certainly an earlier terminology than "virus"
if that's the case.

______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
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            http://www.reach.com/matrix/community-memory.html
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Date:         Fri, 27 Sep 1996 11:50:04 -0400
Reply-To: "CYHIST  Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
              Cyberspace" 
Sender: "CYHIST  Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
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From: John Cowan 
Organization: Lojban Peripheral
Subject:      Re: viruses in non-sf novels
To: Multiple recipients of list CYHIST 
X-UIDL: 843842274.001

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Rob Slade, doting grandpa of Ryan & Trevor wrote:

> As to where the term "worm" came from, there appear to be two very
> different, but somewhat complementary, origins.  The earlier appears
> to be a derived reference from rogue programs which did "wormhole"
> damage to programs and data when they ran out of bounds and started
> performing random operations.  The second, though probably stronger,
> is that Shoch and Hupp, when experimenting with distributed processing
> and what might be called an early attempt at a "good" virus, called their
> segmented program a worm.  (Hence the "Xerox worm".)

My understanding is that "worm" is derived from the 1975 John Brunner sf
novel, *Shockwave Rider*.  You don't give any dates above; can you
supply them?

--
John Cowan                                              cowan@ccil.org
                        e'osai ko sarji la lojban

______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
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Date:         Fri, 27 Sep 1996 11:51:17 -0400
Reply-To: "CYHIST  Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
              Cyberspace" 
Sender: "CYHIST  Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
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From: "A. Padgett Peterson P.E. Information Security"
              
Subject:      Viriiiii
To: Multiple recipients of list CYHIST 
X-UIDL: 843842274.002

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  This was a distinction I tried to make on Homebase and Virus-L many years
  ago (back when another discussion was between "viruses" and "virii"). I
  formulated a set of rules for "malicious software" in which the difference
  was set out under "propagation": only viruses and worms reproduced. (Today
  just about anythinfrom trojans and trapdoors to logic bombs is considered
  a "virus").
  Worms are replicating *stand alone* programs, compete within themselves.
  - they do not need to have termination, the process could continue
    forever.

  Viruses OTOH are replicating *parasitic* programs. They must terminate
  at some point. While viruses can spawn subprocesses (intercepts) the
  primary program must either branch to a pre-existing program or terminate.

  >This distinction didn't last long in the general media since boot infectors
  >throw it for a loop.

  No they do not once the termination/return mechanism is added. At some point
  such low level infectors must return to the normal boot process. An intercept
  may have been spawned but the original boot sequence must be resumed at
  some point for it to be able to propagate.

  >Of course pure boot infectors don't reproduce very fast
  >any more because nobody boots off floppies any more, so any successful boot
  >infector has to have a conventional virus stage as well.

  Take a look at the current virus "wild" reports. While the macro viruses
  are a major problem (primarily because there is no good simple way
  to protect from them), the low level viruses are still the most prevalent
  infections reported. Have no good explination other than either it just
  is or there are a lot of "droppers" which conventional scanners do not
  detect (not a high probability IMNSHO).

  To me the real difference is an architectural phenomena: viruses thrive
  on single user, single tasking systems since tradionally they have no
  defenses. Worms are more prevalent on multi-user multi-tasking systems
  since the same mechanisms which protect users/processes from each other
  tend to afford some level of virus protection while a new process (worm)
  has a good chance of running undetected.

                                        Warmly,
                                                Padgett

  ps a bit off topic but this is something that has concerned me for a
     long time - have written quite a bit of FreeWare (e.g. DiskSecure)
     to combat the low level viruses but seems few are willing to try
     anything that is free.

______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
            http://www.reach.com/matrix/community-memory.html
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Date:         Fri, 27 Sep 1996 12:22:42 -0400
Reply-To: "CYHIST  Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
              Cyberspace" 
Sender: "CYHIST  Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
              Cyberspace" 
From: Daniel P Dern 
Subject:      Re: viruses in non-sf novels
To: Multiple recipients of list CYHIST 
X-UIDL: 843848315.000

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Sheesh.  It was called a "worm" because that what programs like
that -- programs which run on their own versus needing to be
attached/inserted into another program -- are called.  Worms run
on real OSs (e.g., VMS, Unix).

Some media folks did erroneously/simplistically call it a 'virus,'
e.g., the clipping from my inch+ thick file, from MIS Week:
   "Virus Suspect's Mome Stands by Her Son."

OTOH (On the Other Hand), there may be some room for "everybody's
right" here.  According to the sidebar "Cuckoos & Worms" on
p 386-287 of my book, The Internet Guide for New Users (the first,
out of date edition :-(, the original message posted by PeterYee
(NASA Ames) to the tcp-ip mailing list began:

  "We are currently under attack from an Internet Virus."

However, most folks called it a/the Worm.

Hope this helps.

dpd
Daniel Dern (ddern@world.std.com, http://www.dern.com)
  Internet analyst,  author, columnist & speaker
  (617) 969-7947 FAX: (617) 969-7949

______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
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Date:         Fri, 27 Sep 1996 14:23:32 -0400
Reply-To: "CYHIST  Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
              Cyberspace" 
Sender: "CYHIST  Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
              Cyberspace" 
From: Randy Fischer 
Subject:      Re: CYHIST Digest - 25 Sep 1996 to 26 Sep 1996
X-cc:         ross@dcs.warwick.ac.uk
To: Multiple recipients of list CYHIST 
X-UIDL: 843882691.001
Status: RO

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I came in late on this discussion to read Ross Hamilton's message:

> Ob-virus-point: I read in John Markoff's "Cyberpunk" that the Internet
> Worm was so called, rather than the Internet Virus, because people
> claimed that a virus had to be a parasite attached to a program. I
> don't understand why a parasite resident in the computer's memory
> shouldn't be considered a virus regardless of whether it got there
> through being attached to a program.


The analogy is strictly biological: a virus is not usually considered
`alive' by itself, it inserts its genetic code into the genetic code
of the cells of its hosts, and the host replicates the virus as well
as its own biological material in the course of living.

Now the analogous living component in a computer is a running program,
not memory.  The Internet worm primarily replicated itself by running
standalone programs introduced over the network via various OS system
holes. We saw those in our process listings as "(sh)". Lots and lots
of them.

Think of the unix systems as little ecological communities (OS/hardware
resources) with many living organisms (running programs).  The worms are
those "(sh)" programs that were overrunning the ecosystems.

That being said, a component of the internet worm was certainly
viral: a snippet of VAX assembler code (viral genetic code) that was
inserted into the running finger daemon (the infected organism) via a
broken copy-string operation that overran the finger daemon's
executing code (the organism's genetic material).  The snippet was not
executable as a program in and of itself: it required a live program.

This was just one method of entry for the worm, and was specific to VAXen.



The biological analogy kind of breaks  here, since the virus opened
a hole that allowed the worm access.  I don't know offhand of a real
biological analog of a virus and a parasite symbiosis that infects
organisms in such a cooperative manner.

A better biological analogy might be the fungus that infects some insects
nervous systems, causing them to change their behavior and expose (nay,
advertise) themselves to birds which eat them, fungus and all.  The fungus
gets spread in bird droppings which the insects pick up, and round and
round you go. Nature is not kind.

By the way, the biological metaphor suggested several interesting
approaches to net security at the time; it was pointed out that
internet systems were all basically alike, unix monocultures,
like Kansas wheatfields or the Irish potato crops.

One problem with moncultures is that a new rogue organism -- a mold
or rust -- can wipe out your entire crop.

So a suggestion was that there be variability just for variability's
sake in system design to avoid these kinds of catastrophic
failures.  But of course, in my networks I try to get everything as
similar as possible to  make it managable.  And monocultures (whether
a kansas wheatfield or natural spartina marsh) are the most productive
ecosystems going.


                                                Randy Fischer

______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
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            http://www.reach.com/matrix/community-memory.html
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______________________________________________________________________
Date:         Fri, 27 Sep 1996 15:44:39 EST
Reply-To: "CYHIST  Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
              Cyberspace" 
Sender: "CYHIST  Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
              Cyberspace" 
From: "Rob Slade, doting grandpa of Ryan & Trevor"
              
Subject:      Re: viruses in non-sf novels
To: Multiple recipients of list CYHIST 
X-UIDL: 843882691.002
Status: RO

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From: John Cowan 

>My understanding is that "worm" is derived from the 1975 John Brunner sf
>novel, *Shockwave Rider*.  You don't give any dates above; can you
>supply them?

The "classic" version of Shoch and Hupp's paper was published in CACM in
1982.  It contains a reference to an earlier paper from 1980.  The
paper does contain a quote from "The Shockwave Rider", so they definitely
knew of the story.  Brunner, though, mostly talks about a "tapeworm", so
I would have expected Shoch and Hupp to use that if they had coined the
term from Brunner.

The "wormhole damage" etiology goes back to the 60s at the latest.

======================
roberts@decus.ca         rslade@vcn.bc.ca         slade@freenet.victoria.bc.ca
link to virus, book info at http://www.freenet.victoria.bc.ca/techrev/rms.html
Author "Robert Slade's Guide to Computer Viruses" 0-387-94663-2 (800-SPRINGER)

______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
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Date:         Fri, 27 Sep 1996 18:25:07 -0500
Reply-To: "CYHIST  Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
              Cyberspace" 
Sender: "CYHIST  Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
              Cyberspace" 
From: "David S. Bennahum" 
Subject:      CM> Memories of Robert Morris?
To: Multiple recipients of list CYHIST 
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Status: RO

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Would anyone like to share first-hand accounts of how they dealt with the
famous "Internet Worm"?

best,
db

______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
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Date:         Sat, 28 Sep 1996 10:07:46 -0600
Reply-To: "CYHIST  Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
              Cyberspace" 
Sender: "CYHIST  Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
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From: Nelson Winkless 
Subject:      CM> Brief Recollections
To: Multiple recipients of list CYHIST 
X-UIDL: 843929618.001

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Recent postings trigger some minor memories, not worth
threads of their own.

Rivalries -- Corporate, not among zealous end-users

When Processor Technology attempted to attend the First World Altair
Computer Conference as an exhibitor, MITS Leader Ed Roberts was
reportedly highly indignant, complaining that Processor Tech was a
direct competitor trying to horn in on a MITS event. He forbade their
official exhibit, but couldn't prevent them from renting a suite in the
then-Marina Hotel at the Albuquerque airport, which they did,
attracting a good bit of attention.

MITS people also considered the IMSAI computer a monkey copy of the
ALTAIR, and were outraged by it, though they admitted that they had
no patents or copyrights to protect their ideas. This was sort of a
precursor to the "look and feel" hassle between Apple and Microsoft
a few year later.

An outfit in Santa Barbara produced a clever little system, which they
called the "Mini-Altair." David Bunnell, then of MITS, called them to
explain that they couldn't just appropriate the name as well as the bus.
The folks seemed a bit surprised, but cooperative. They changed their
company name to Polymorphic Systems, and changed their product names
to the "PolyXX," for example, the Poly88. (Polymorphic Systems was about
the classiest looking of the early computer companies, with great ads,
literature, exhibition booth, etc... One regrets their disappearance.)


And on Commodore--
The references to legal struggles at Commodore remind me that I twice made
appointments to see people at Commodore in  the office on California Street
just off El Camino at the edge of Stanford Industrial Park. On both occasions,
three or four months apart, when I arrived at the front desk, the receptionist
couldn't even identify the person with whom I had made the appointment a
couple of days earlier. Not only were those people no longer on staff, the
receptionists had never heard of them, and didn't know where to look for
their successors. One of the missing parties was Chuck Peddle. Staff
turnover was apparently vigorous at all levels. Both of the receptionists
were brand
new hires, with zero knowledge of company history. Gee, those were sobering
visits to Mr. Tramiel's domain.

--Nels
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Nelson Winkless                   Email: correspo@swcp.com
ABQ Communications Corporation    Voice: 505-897-0822
P.O. Box 1432                     Fax:   505-898-6525
Corrales NM 87048 USA             Website: http://www.swcp.com/correspo

______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
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Date:         Sat, 28 Sep 1996 17:15:20 -0400
Reply-To: "CYHIST  Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
              Cyberspace" 
Sender: "CYHIST  Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
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From: "A. Padgett Peterson P.E. Information Security"
              
Subject:      Morris case culture still with us
To: Multiple recipients of list CYHIST 
X-UIDL: 844026002.003
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really far from the charter (is there one ?) but painful anyway.

Apparently Katie Hafner rote:
>It was a classic collision of two
>worlds: the totally non-computer-oriented lay public and the computer
>science community.

Just had a similar eye-opening experience. Five years ago my wife was
rearended in her car while legally stopped. She is now considered disabled
by the state of Florida yet depite $4000 damage to the car, the adversary
was able to convince a jury that she had suffered no injury beyond a
muscle sprain.

One of the means was the fact that my wife regularly uses the Internet
despite a traumatic brain injury. What was completly lost on the jury was
the fact that her PC is one that I built for her that uses very simple
menus and single key commands (after turning it on, it takes only
two menu-driven keystrokes for a PPP connection to be established).

I suspect it will be the next century before things will be any different.

                                        Warmly,
                                                Padgett

______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
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Date:         Sat, 28 Sep 1996 18:25:37 -0600
Reply-To: "CYHIST  Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
              Cyberspace" 
Sender: "CYHIST  Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
              Cyberspace" 
From: Katie Hafner 
Subject:      Virus vs. Worm and the Morris case in general
To: Multiple recipients of list CYHIST 
X-UIDL: 843929618.000

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With regard to the distinction between "worm" and "virus" as it was drawn
in Cyberpunk, I thought I might share with this list the following:

As I was reporting that section of the book in 1989, I had long discussions
with both Peter and Dorothy Denning. Peter had just devoted nearly an
entire issue (or was it the entire issue?) of the Communications of the ACM
to the Internet Worm, and I was talking with Dorothy quite a bit because of
her new interest in computer crime.  Frustrated by their insistence that I
call the program a worm and not a virus, I asked Dorothy, "Why does it
really matter?"  She sighed (oh these journalists, she was surely
thinking), "Katie,  it's essential that there be rigor in language." And
her wise words have guided me ever since.

Also, I sat through every single minute of Morris's two-week trial. It was
fascinating to watch the prosecutors build their case, which they did by
calling in no fewer than a dozen people from around the country, who
described in great technical detail (well beyond the jurors' comprehension)
how they were affected by the incident. It was a classic collision of two
worlds: the totally non-computer-oriented lay public and the computer
science community.  Watching that trial was one of the most enriching and
eye-opening experiences I've ever had as a journalist,  and that case, in
its many intricacies, was far more interesting to report than the other two
sections of the book.


------------------------

Katie Hafner
Technology Correspondent         (707) 935-8664 -- voice
Newsweek Magazine                  (707) 935-8809 -- fax

______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
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Date:         Sun, 29 Sep 1996 17:21:27 +0100
Reply-To: "CYHIST  Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
              Cyberspace" 
Sender: "CYHIST  Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
              Cyberspace" 
From: Ross 
Subject:      Re: Virus vs. Worm and the Morris case in general
To: Multiple recipients of list CYHIST 
X-UIDL: 844026763.002
Status: RO

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What a great subject for CM! The first one I've been really getting
into in quite a while :-)

[Katie Hafner wrote, about "Cyberpunk"]
> Frustrated by their insistence that I call the program a worm and
> not a virus, I asked Dorothy [Denning], "Why does it really matter?"
> She sighed (oh these journalists, she was surely thinking), "Katie,
> it's essential that there be rigor in language." And her wise words
> have guided me ever since.

I know it sounds sycophantic, but can I just add that Cyberpunk is far
and away the best book of its genre *precisely* because of this
attention to detail. So many similar books (Approaching Zero springs
to mind immediately) are ruined by their author's obvious failure to
comprehend the technical aspects of the story - after all, if they
can't tell immediately that, say, a hack that works on VAX VMS isn't
going to also work on Berkely Unix, then they shouldn't be trying to
write a book on the subject.

[BTW, is John Markoff (Katie Hafner's co-author) also on this email
list?]

How about discussing the merits/shortcomings of books on computer
history and/or culture? Would anybody care to post reviews of such
books to this list? I'd be happy to start the ball rolling if there
was any enthusiasm for the idea.

Ross

.-------Ross Hamilton, PhD Student in the History of Computing-------.
| http://www.dcs.warwick.ac.uk/~ross | mailto:ross@dcs.warwick.ac.uk |
|    Department of Computer Science, | 12 Newbold Place, Leamington  |
| Uni. of Warwick, Coventry, CV4 7AL | Spa, Warwks, CV32 4HR, UK     |
`-------------- Office: 01203 528043 | Home: 01926 886146 -----------'

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            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
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Date:         Sun, 29 Sep 1996 12:22:38 -0500
Reply-To: mids-help@mids.org
Sender: "CYHIST  Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
              Cyberspace" 
From: "John S. Quarterman" 
Subject:      Re: Morris case culture still with us
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>(after turning it on, it takes only
>two menu-driven keystrokes for a PPP connection to be established).

I think that's the root of the problem.  Most people don't understand
that computers are just that: computers.  Things that carry out
complicated processes by themselves.  Most people think of them as
being like toasters or microwave ovens or televisions or VCRs, which
they tell tiny explicit steps.  Everone on this list knows that most of
those things have CPUs in them these days, but remember that most people
can't figure out how to *program* their VCRs.

Most PCs (especially including Macs) reinforce this perception of
computers-as-toasters, with their requests for confirmation at every step.
This isn't by accident, either.  When Bill Gates was at Harvard his
position was that RT/11 or at most RSX/11 was all most people would
ever want; UNIX was certainly overkill.  So eventually he gave them
MS/DOS, which is RSX/11 warmed over.

In the Stewart Brand book on the Media Lab, there's a striking passage
where Brand notes that they *left their computers on all the time*.  He
couldn't figure out why, and he didn't even understand that that was
the more basic tradition, not the later one of a single-user single-process
non-networked PC that might as well be turned off because it's not
doing anything when you're not pedalling it.

My business partner gets great amusement out of explaining to our ISP
customers what our computers are doing while nobody is using them directly.
Backing up to tape, sending reminders, and talking to other computers to
exchange mail and serve web pages, files, domain names, etc.  The
concept that a computers can do stuff like that without being told each
step is amazing to many people.

The Internet may slowly change this perception, as people notice that
web servers are running all the time.  However, their own computers
don't usually run servers, so it's still not really direct personal
experience.

As for those of us who do understand these things, we forget how different
they are from what went before.  Computers and networks, particularly
the Internet, really are new things in the world.

After all, what would you compare them to in pre-computing experience?
No machines could do that before.  If you're thinking of the telephone
network, remember that what smarts it has is in computers.  Maybe
old-style human telephone operators?  But they went off-shift at times.
I would think the traditional hacker metaphor of Greek daemons would be
a bit out of most people's experience, as well.  Plain old demons,
maybe, but I'm not sure that's a metaphor we really want to encourage,
not the least because it's not very accurate.  I don't think I'd want
to argue in front of a jury with any of these comparisons.

Thanks,
John

John S. Quarterman 
Editor, Matrix Maps Quarterly and Matrix News 
MIDS Internet Weather Report 
President, Matrix Information and Directory Services (MIDS)
http://www.mids.org, +1-512-451-7602, fax: +1-512-452-0127
1106 Clayton Lane, Suite 500W
Austin, TX 78723
U.S.A.

______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
            http://www.reach.com/matrix/community-memory.html
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Date:         Sun, 29 Sep 1996 17:01:01 -0400
Reply-To: "CYHIST  Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
              Cyberspace" 
Sender: "CYHIST  Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
              Cyberspace" 
From: "A. Padgett Peterson P.E. Information Security"
              
Subject:      Laziness
To: Multiple recipients of list CYHIST 
X-UIDL: 844097864.001

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 Community Memory: Discussion List on the History of Cyberspace
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John rote:
>In the Stewart Brand book on the Media Lab, there's a striking passage
>where Brand notes that they *left their computers on all the time*.  He
>couldn't figure out why, and he didn't even understand that that was
>the more basic tradition, not the later one of a single-user single-process
>non-networked PC that might as well be turned off because it's not
>doing anything when you're not pedalling it.


Suspect the trend started in the firebottle days when the hardest thing you
could do to a tube was a cold start. After a few dozen times of having
to toggle in the bootstrap by hand and load the tapes to bring the kernel
up and then use that to bring the OS up (anyone here ever load Linux from
scrach onto a bare disk ? First you build the boot floppy...) good reason
not to turn the computer off if you did not have to.

Brings up another problem that is no more - anyone remember CPU seconds ?
(dockmaster still does). Used to be that there was a charge for connect
-hours and another for CPU usage (and another for disk storage but it was
small). Long time ago, back in the days when a 1200 baud modem was a
U$1000 proposition I wrote a program called "TALK" for the VAX. In FORTRAN
though it use a lot of QIO and QIOW calls.

Essentally TALK turned the VAX into a VT-100 emulator and allowed one VAX
to dial up another. It could also transfer programs in TEKHEX (a predecessor
to UUENCODE) by bringing up an editor on the DE and saving the binary as a
text file. I even had a DCL program that converted it back to binary that
I could also send to the DE.

It got used quite widely until one of my co-workers used it on a Friday
afternoon and forgot to turn it off. Was not discovered until the following
Monday. Now being interactive and having to keep track of two serial ports
in real time under VMS , TALK was frankly a CPU hog. Next week
when we received the prior usage figures, our department was down for
a U$30,000+ CPU charge that took months to get straightened out.

                                        Warmly,
                                                Padgett


______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
                    Moderator: Community Memory
            http://www.reach.com/matrix/community-memory.html
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Date:         Mon, 30 Sep 1996 10:01:04 -0400
Reply-To: "CYHIST  Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
              Cyberspace" 
Sender: "CYHIST  Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
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From: Wendell Piez 
Subject:      Declarative Markup
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Prompted by Randy Fisher's fine SGML neologism,



-- and finding myself these days deep in the theory and practice of text
encoding, I'm wondering if participants in this list would be able to shed any
light on the development of declarative encoding ('descriptive') as opposed to
the procedural sort ('prescriptive').... Where did the distinction emerge? When
was it established or formalized? (Etymology of the terms?)

-- Wendell Piez
   Center for Electronic Texts in the Humanities
   piez@rci.rutgers.edu

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            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
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Date:         Mon, 30 Sep 1996 09:11:41 -0500
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              retained.
From: "John S. Quarterman" 
Subject:      Re: [TIC-3875] Re: Morris case culture still with us
X-To:         Peter da Silva 
To: Multiple recipients of list CYHIST 
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>> As for those of us who do understand these things, we forget how different
>> they are from what went before.  Computers and networks, particularly
>> the Internet, really are new things in the world.
>
>> After all, what would you compare them to in pre-computing experience?
>
>A bureaucracy.

That's probably the best analogy, although comparing the Internet to the IRS
probably isn't going to thrill anybody. :-)

> An army of willing slaves prepared to slavishly follow your
>every order no matter how foolish.

Not bad, although people like Clauswitz and Napoleon write about the
"fog of battle" in which nothing goes quite as planned.  Also, most
people have never had their own personal armies.

> RUR. Workers. Serfs. Robots.

Workers and serfs were never that obedient, and the Taylor theory
of management was based on the principle that you couldn't trust
the workers to carry out any but the most simple and circumscribed tasks.
Computers (and people) are actually smarter than that.

RUR and Robots never existed before computers, and still don't exist
in the classic sf forms.

>Asimov saw it clearest in The Naked Sun.

A pretty good example.  How many of the general public have read it?

Thanks,
John

John S. Quarterman 
Editor, Matrix Maps Quarterly and Matrix News 
MIDS Internet Weather Report 
President, Matrix Information and Directory Services (MIDS)
http://www.mids.org, +1-512-451-7602, fax: +1-512-452-0127
1106 Clayton Lane, Suite 500W
Austin, TX 78723
U.S.A.

______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
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Date:         Mon, 30 Sep 1996 16:10:23 -0400
Reply-To: "CYHIST  Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
              Cyberspace" 
Sender: "CYHIST  Community Memory: Discussion list on the History of
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From: "John W. Cobb" 
Subject:      Memories of the Amiga
To: Multiple recipients of list CYHIST 
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>This was the eventual downfall of both machines, as Jack Tramiel sucked
>away Commodore's and Atari's resources in a long drawn out lawsuit over
>the Amiga purchase (which rumor has it Jack had originally initiated when
>he was at Commodore). *sigh* Politics sucks.
>
>I can't think of any combination of great equipment utterly destroyed by
>corporate politics quite as bizarre as that, at least not in the computer
>world... but I could be wrong. Who wants to play "let's top that" on this
>one?

Speaking of Commodore's "fumbling the ball" with the Amiga, one story that
circulated around the time of one of the Star Trek Movies was that the
producers came to Commodore and offered to use the Amiga as a prop in the
movie. Instead of recognizing this as a golden advertising opportunity for
a product placement, Commodore asked the production company to pay retail
for the Amiga's they proposed to use. The producers picked up their jaws,
trundled off to Cupertino and found a much more receptive audience at
Apple. So the story goes, that is why Scotty is talking to a Macintosh
mouse instead of an Amiga mouse in the "Star Trek saves the whales" movie.
Can anyone confirm this story? I know I have heard it several times, but
never once "straight from the Whale's Spout" so to speak.

An afterward to that story has Commodore using the supposed fact that many
of the console displays on the Enterprise Bridge were in fact driven by
Amigas as a form of damage control to the advertising fiasco about the
product placement.

There were myriad stories about how Commodore bought a company that
produced one of the then best personal computers and drove it straight into
the ground with bad marketing (pricing, advertising, support,...)
Conventional wisdom said Commodore thought of itself as a chip company
rather than a computer system company and it never understood the gem that
was the Amiga.

Computer historians may remember also that while not unique, Commodore
probably had the absolute worst relationship with both its resellers and
its end-users.

The early Commodore 64's were sold in specialty computer stores in the
early 80's. These were boutiques that grew out of the computer hobbyist
movement. Many of the hobbiest opened strip-mall stores to sell home
computers to a wider market (Apple II's, Commodore Pets and later 64's and
even later, IBM PC's). These stores were high priced. The customer had to
pay not only for the machine but also had to cover the operating cost of
the store-front and its personal, which was often large because there was a
lot of hand-holding of potential customers to convince them to part with
cash for a new-fangled home computer. What these stores particularly hated
were customers who took an hour of a salesman's time explaining a product
only to have the customer go somewhere else and pay 3% less to a store that
provided no sales support. So a computer maker had to pick their
distribution channel carefully because sales at the computer boutiques and
at mass market electronic discounters were mutually exclusive. Well
Commodore nurtured the boutique channel. It helped them establish the C64
as a "real computer" (another benefit of the manufacturer suffering the
increased product cost of selling through the boutiques was that the
boutiques had a vested interest in their product, so they pushed favorable
product propaganda). Well around 83-84 Commodore cut off their distributors
at the knees. They signed a distribution agreement with K-mart who sold
C64's at around 1/2 price of the boutiques. While the boutiques would
demonstrate the machines and let customers test drive them, K-mart had the
machines locked behind glass cases and they could not be touched until they
were purchased. Needless to say, the boutique owners hit the roof and hated
Commodore with a vengeance, especially since they were often stuck with a
large amount of inventory whose wholesale cost was now more than the K-mart
retail price. For years afterward I remember talking to several computer
store owners who swore they would never carry another Commodore product now
matter how good it was. No-one should find it surprising then, that
Commodore had real problems finding distribution channels for the Amiga
when it came to market several years later.

Commodore had a reputation for treating its users no better than its
distributors. Amiga users were an interesting lot. The AmigaDOS felt a
great deal like Unix-BSD. It was probably the first home personal computer
that made itself felt on the internet (perhaps the Mac as well). There were
many associated usenet groups and a large internet based repository of
shareware (anybody remember the "FISH DISKS" archive?). The reason was that
Amiga users quickly learned they were on their own. Commodore was not going
to support them (or for that matter they would not vigorously support 3rd
party developers either.) So Amiga users banded together and mutually
supported each other. They also shared many stories about their frustration
about their perception of Commodore's mismanagement of the Amiga
brand-name. One interesting episode in this flap was when Amiga users began
a campaign for users to buy a single share of Commodore and to attend the
shareholders' meetings and heckle the management team about their business
decisions. At one point, a significant contingent even followed the meeting
to Bermuda (I believe) and even hounded them there.

As I look back on it, it seems kind of humorous. But it was done in
seriousness at the time.

-john .w cobb

John W. Cobb                                    cobbjw@ornl.gov
Office of Computing and Network Management      V. 423.576.5439
Oak Ridge National Laboratory                   F. 423.241.5722
MS-6486                       "Generally, I don't order meatloaf
Oak Ridge, TN 37831-6486       in a restaurant that sells bait."

______________________________________________________________________
            Posted by David S. Bennahum (davidsol@panix.com)
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