Timeline of computer viruses and worms
computer malware timeline
This timeline of computer viruses and worms presents a chronological timeline of noteworthy computer viruses, computer worms, Trojan horses, similar malware, related research and events.
1960s
1966
John von Neumann's article on the "Theory of self-reproducing automata" is published in 1966. The article is based on lectures given by von Neumann at the University of Illinois about the "Theory and Organization of Complicated Automata" in 1949.
1970s
1970
The first story written about a computer virus, The Scarred Man by Gregory Benford, was published in the May 1970 issue of Venture Science Fiction.
1971
The Creeper system, an experimental self-replicating program, is written by Bob Thomas at BBN Technologies to test John von Neumann's theory. Creeper infected DEC PDP-10 computers running the TENEX operating system. Creeper gained access via the ARPANET and copied itself to the remote system where the message "I'm the creeper : catch me if you can!" was displayed. The Reaper program was later created to delete Creeper.
At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, a graduate student named Alan Davis (working for Prof. Donald Gillies) created a process on a PDP-11 that (a) checked to see if an identical copy of itself was currently running as an active process, and if not, created a copy of itself and started it running; (b) checked to see if any disk space (which all users shared) was available, and if so, created a file the size of that space; and (c) looped back to step (a).
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1292360. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1966, 1949, 1970 and 1971.
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This entry incorporates text from “Timeline of computer viruses and worms” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.