Thanks to Orv Beach for this
link.
“The Melissa virus has struck, trailing in her wake an
increasingly familiar chorus of admonitions about the dark
underside of our technological revolution–warnings that the
sophistication of computers today and the scale of the Internet
make us uniquely vulnerable to these mysterious threats. Yet one
could also argue that computer viruses are pretty much as old as
the computing networks that make them communicable–and that they
can teach us valuable lessons as well as threaten us with calamity.
For proof, one need only go to the birthplace of the field: Xerox’s
Palo Alto Research Center. The legendary Xerox PARC gave us not
only the first personal computer, the first graphical user
interface and the first laser printer, but arguably the first
virus.”
“The possibilities were infinite. Shoch imagined PARC’s Altos
not as 200 computers, but as a single meta-computer with 200
processors, all linked via the worm. Shoch’s brainstorm hinted at a
method of compounding processor power that would one day find wide
application in the field of supercomputers.”