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