1 Unix The World’s First Computer Virus “Two of the most famous products of Berkeley are LSD and Unix. I don’t think that this is a coincidence.” —Anonymous Viruses compete by being as small and as adaptable as possible. They aren’t very complex: rather than carry around the baggage necessary for arcane tasks like respiration, metabolism, and locomotion, they only have enough DNA or RNA to get themselves replicated. For example, any par- ticular influenza strain is many times smaller than the cells it infects, yet it successfully mutates into a new strain about every other flu season. Occa- sionally, the virulence goes way up, and the resulting epidemic kills a few million people whose immune systems aren’t nimble enough to kill the invader before it kills them. Most of the time they are nothing more than a minor annoyance—unavoidable, yet ubiquitous. The features of a good virus are: • Small Size Viruses don’t do very much, so they don't need to be very big. Some folks debate whether viruses are living creatures or just pieces of destructive nucleoic acid and protein.

4 Unix • Portability A single virus can invade many different types of cells, and with a few changes, even more. Animal and primate viruses often mutate to attack humans. Evidence indicates that the AIDS virus may have started as a simian virus. • Ability to Commandeer Resources of the Host If the host didn’t provide the virus with safe haven and energy for replication, the virus would die. • Rapid Mutation Viruses mutate frequently into many different forms. These forms share common structure, but differ just enough to confuse the host's defense mechanisms. Unix possesses all the hallmarks of a highly successful virus. In its original incarnation, it was very small and had few features. Minimality of design was paramount. Because it lacked features that would make it a real operat- ing system (such as memory mapped files, high-speed input/output, a robust file system, record, file, and device locking, rational interprocess communication, et cetera, ad nauseam), it was portable. A more functional operating system would have been less portable. Unix feeds off the energy of its host without a system administrator baby-sitting Unix, it regularly panics, dumps core, and halts. Unix frequently mutates: kludges and fixes to make one version behave won't work on another version. If Andromeda Strain had been software, it would have been Unix. Unix is a computer virus with a user interface. History of the Plague The roots of the Unix plague go back to the 1960s, when American Telephone and Telegraph, General Electric, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology embarked on a project to develop a new kind of computer system called an “information utility.” Heavily funded by the Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (then known as ARPA), the idea was to develop a single computer system that would be as reliable as an electrical power plant: providing nonstop computational resources to hundreds or thousands of people. The information utility would be equipped with redundant central processor units, memory banks, and input/ output processors, so that one could be serviced while others remained running. The system was designed to have the highest level of computer