Wayne and Garth silliness for flashbacks.....

It was the late 80s and I was one of three people in the first high school programming class. Apple IIs rocked and the three of us knew them pretty damn well. One moreso than the rest of us (no, not me). As a result we got to goof off more than the others and took advantage of the time in spades.

The teacher knew quite a bit about computers but then something totally alien happened. It was something NONE of us had ever experienced before in our lives. it was the first virus to hit home computers. While mostly harmless, it did manage to show up while the teacher was evaluating another student's work on a 5.25" floppy drive (yay, the 8" drives had gone the way of the dinos by then). No HD on these computers, just one or two 5.25". A piece of tape could be used to get around copy protection.

This virus was the now famous Elk Cloner.

Please reference back about the goofing off. This included writing little files to screw with other people. For some reason that I am sure was not completely unfounded at the time, I was blamed for writing this little program up. ((Insert innocent smile, halo, and music from above here.))

Fortunately for me it was quickly established that I did not write the code. However, the guy who originally did is known and here is an article on him.

Prank starts 25 years of computer security woes