What you are overlooking is that the only criteria that makes something a virus is that it replicates. (makes copies of itself)

Most of the viruses we ever tracked did only that and nothing more. The first Apple II virus was written by kids in Philadelphia, followed by Skrenta and Elk Cloner.

The first PC virus found in the wild was the Pakistani BRAIN virus written by Fasit and Amjad Faruq alvi in 1988.

None of those mentioned had any destructive action at all. Almost no viruses did anything destructive–but they got all the press. (if it bleeds it leads)

Except in the movies. In the movies viruses cause earthquakes, tip over oil tankers, open bank vault doors and so on. Movie viruses are magic, the modern deus ex machina.

#2
Does anyone here “spend a lot of money on anti-virus software”? Use free AVG ,
spybot S&D, and Adaware. Costs = $0

Better yet , but your hard drive on the shelf.
Boot off of a Linux ‘live cd’ that can run
100% in ram like Puppy Linux. Problem solved!

From Wikipedia:
“The Creeper virus was first detected on ARPANET, the forerunner of the Internet in the early 1970s. Creeper was an experimental self-replicating program written by Bob Thomas at BBN in 1971.”

Long ago, I stop subscribing to print magazines, like Pop. Electronics and various offering computer programs (in BASIC). Because I realized that they always had errors in whatever project they featured. And it took two or more issues to publish the corrections. As if the authors NEVER checked if the damn things worked, before going to print. Humbug! They knew. This had to be done on purpose. And the circuit projects always used at least one hard to find component. So unless you paid for the author’s kit, you could built squat!

All of which causes one to wonder about at least some of the errors that crop up in Windows code, and other applications. Requiring frequent fixes and patches, that also introduce more changes that people may not had liked in the beginning. Like Adobe sneaking in all the extra junk to their PDF reader.

What a surprise…

Agreed, it might not be useful for software distribution. But as with all basic programming algorithms it’s usefulness isn’t limited to a single application.

I’m anxious to try the Chrome. Some how I get the feeling that it’s not as ‘online’ as once purported.

Viruses exist because they have a purpose. In the great majority of cases they try to enslave a machine to use it as an illegal spam distribution point, and enter straight through the browser. There’s nothing to be gained by shutting down a server or collecting usernames and passwords, unless that gives you access to credit card data or are involved in cyberwarfare or industrial espionage. In general servers are very well protected, it’s the average user that runs around with it’s pants down and picking daisys.
Anyways, they’d've never fixed HAL in ’2010′ without a tapeworm virus.

With the “cloud” of nowdays and the future, I don’t think software replication will be useful, all your important applications will be on your browser, a concept used on the ChromeOS.
I just hope it will not be that way until we have some kind of ubiquitous wireless connection to the internets everywhere.
Maybe the viruses of the future will just try to shut down servers or stealing millions of usernames and passwords at once, leaving intact the user PC.

Definitely, it doesn’t make any difference who used it first. This is the guy who got the credit, big deal. It’s sort of like M$ taking credit for the nested loop, but without the patent BS. An idea so basic had to be discovered by someone sooner or later. If I were him I’d try to patent software self replication, it’s an idea whose usefulness goes far beyond virus. Especially in cloud computing.