Today we take computer viruses for granted.

It’s almost impossible to go off the grid, which means that we’ve come to accept the risk of viruses as the price we pay for staying connected.

Not even our electricity system is safe. The prepaid system in Jozi was hit by a ransomware attack last month.

Before words like ‘ransomware’, ‘virus’ and ‘malware’ became a part of the average person’s tech vocabulary, there was the ‘Morris Worm’.

Here’s Mashable:

In the beginning — the very, very beginning — computers inspired utopian visions of a better future, a world in which we were all digitally connected to one another and living in harmony.

Then came the Morris Worm.

At Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center, programmers were developing high-speed networks and the means by which computers could communicate with one another. This was the birth of the internet, and programmers’ ambitions pushed the limits of the imagination. But no one in Palo Alto could’ve imagined how bringing computers together would allow one bad actor to tear the system apart.

Mashable and PCMag have put together a show called Kernel Panic. The first episode takes viewers back to the moment, in 1988, when the Morris Worm changed everything.

Enjoy it in full, here:

[source:mashable]