computer virii turn 26 years old...

[deadrats]

http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/2009/11/1110fred-cohen-first-computer-virus

1983: Fred Cohen, a University of Southern California graduate student, gives a prescient peek at the digital future when he demonstrates a computer virus during a security seminar at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania. A quarter-century later, computer viruses have become a pandemic for which there's no inoculation.

the funny thing is the computer virus predates Windows by 2 full years and the very first computer virus victim was...a UNIX mainframe.

here's the best part, the first piece of malware that we would technically call a virus today was...a boot sector virus that attacked, ready for this...Apple II's.

i love it...

[jman98]

The correct plural of virus in English is viruses. It is NOT virii. See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plural_form_of_words_ending_in_-us#Virus

People generalize from the fact that fungus and hippopotamus have weird "end in i" plurals and assume it applies to everything when it does not. It's also "octopuses" not "octopi" by the way.

[usually_quiet]

Octopuses is the preferred plural, but octopi and octopodes are still listed as acceptable in most comprehensive dictionaries.

[yoda313]

And of course they were first distributed on floppy disks.

Were there any viruses released on telnet or whatever the preinternet bbs services were?

[lordsmurf]

Virus on BBS? Hell yes. I remember people used to infect our school and college networks.