ugh.book

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Unix

The World’s First Computer Virus

“Two of the most famous products of Berkeley are LSD and Unix. I

don’t think that this is a coincidence.”

—Anonymous

Viruses compete by being as small and as adaptable as possible. They

aren’t very complex: rather than carry around the baggage necessary for

arcane tasks like respiration, metabolism, and locomotion, they only have

enough DNA or RNA to get themselves replicated. For example, any par-

ticular influenza strain is many times smaller than the cells it infects, yet it

successfully mutates into a new strain about every other flu season. Occa-

sionally, the virulence goes way up, and the resulting epidemic kills a few

million people whose immune systems aren’t nimble enough to kill the

invader before it kills them. Most of the time they are nothing more than a

minor annoyance—unavoidable, yet ubiquitous.

The features of a good virus are:

• Small Size
  Viruses don’t do very much, so they don't need to be very big. Some
  folks debate whether viruses are living creatures or just pieces of
  destructive nucleoic acid and protein.