"I am the creeper: Catch me if you can." This message sounds like it came straight out of a Victorian nursery rhyme, a 1971 History of Programming Shown on the first virus Creeper. Today we will tell you everything!
Creeper was created by Bob Thomas, a developer at BBN Technologies, which is at the forefront of the emerging technology industry. The Thomas Programming Crawler tests whether a program can be created to move between computers. In other words, his idea was not to destroy personal computers. In fact, it was only a few years later that Creeper was considered a virus, as the concept was not applied to computers until the 1980s.
Did Creeper achieve its goals?
The crawler spreads through ARPANET (one of the first computer networks used by the U.S. Department of Defense) and replicates into systems, where it displays the information I wrote at the beginning of this article. Once displayed, it starts printing the file, but then stops and switches to another PC, and does the same thing.
Although it infected computers when it first appeared, the effect didn't last long: jump to the next computer, it disappeared from the previous computer, and so on.
Today, this might look like a failure, but in 1971, Bob Thomas' experiment got a lot of attention for the feat of getting programs to jump between PCs without human intervention. It is impossible to achieve. His success was creating a program that ran quickly from PC to PC... and was the reason for the creation of the first antivirus program!
Reaper: Enemy of the Creeper
After the Creeper, comes the Reaper (the perfect tool to cut off the Creeper). Created in 1973, this program removes crawler "viruses" from your system, so it can be considered the first "antivirus program".
Once again, although this is more of a modern concept, we can call it antivirus software because it performs the same functions as antivirus software.
What we are not sure about is the person who programmed Reaper. Some say it was Bob Thomas himself who decided to take control of his "creature". Others believe its creator was Ray Tomlinson, the developer who would create email years later.
Legacy of the Creeper and the Reaper
While Creeper did not achieve 100% of its goals, Reaper was a very simple antivirus software, but both marked a milestone in computer history.
In 1973, the same year Reaper was founded, author and screenwriter Michael Crichton was the first to apply the concept of "virus" to the field of technology. He did this thing in the movie Westworld where the humanoid robots in an amusement park were like they shouldn't be doing this. Yes, the recent HBO series is based on this legendary film.
Talk about this type of PC virus when Rabbit was created in 1974. Rabbit is a non-stop replicating program that replicates itself on a single computer until it blocks its system, slows down its performance and eventually wipes it out. Yes, here we see bad intentions starting to emerge.
A few years later, in 1981, Elk Cloner was created, a virus that affected the Apple II (yes, Apples weren't very safe in the past). And in 1986, we said hello to the "Brain" virus, the first major virus, affecting a then-massive 20,000 PCs (this time from IBM).
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