A tidbit about Fred Cohen and the First Ever Computer Virus on the Beeb: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8366703.stm Except that I'm thinking that "first ever" is an exaggeration. Perhaps "first ever published for review". Even the name wasn't new in 1983. Around 1973, ten years earlier, I recall a CDC Sunnyvale ops emplyee got into some mischief on the Development Center 6400 running SCOPE 3.4 by writing a rather simple program that made use of two PP calls-- RSJ, to reschedule a job and RPV the "reprieve" service, used to recover from a job-terminating error, including a normal EOJ. The net result was that the job filled up the input queue with copies of itself and any attempt by the operator to kill it would simply spawn more copies. I seem to remember that the message displayed by the job was "You have caught a virus" or something similar. The only way out of the mess was to initiate a non-recovery deadstart of the system and then sort through jobs submitted for running before resubmitting them to find the culprit. I don't recall the name of the employee or what division he worked for; only that the COMSOURCE people wanted his head on a pike. This was about the time of one of many layoffs, so the guy may have been a short-timer anyway and just wanted to fire a parting shot. Does anyone else have a similar (earlier) story? --Chuck