In 1970, John Horton Conway\u2019s \u201cGame of Life<\/a>\u201d created a simulated landscape of \u2018cells\u2019 that could multiply, die, or maintain their state based on a simple set of rules. Those simple rules produced unpredicted and complex \u2019emergent\u2019 behaviours, including behaviors indicative of indefinite self-replication. This experimental proof of a Von Neumann universal constructor demonstrated that digital environments could generate complexities previously only observed in the natural world.<\/p>\n Between 1970 and 1988, computers became powerful, cheap \u2013 and connected. Although the Internet existed by the late 1980s, only a few military and academic institutions had been connected through it. Many other businesses and universities used a more accessible system known as UUCP<\/a> (\u2018Unix-to-Unix Copy\u2019, though by 1988 it ran on nearly every computer imaginable). UUCP created a \u2018virtual internet\u2019 of computers exchanging data via dial-up modems. When one computer had a message to send to another computer, it would phone the destination computer\u2019s modem, transmit the data, then end the call.<\/p>\n While UUCP might sound quaint in our era of gigabit fibre connections to the home, it worked well as a distribution platform for the first two big forms of social media: electronic mail and news. Machines would call one another all day long, exchanging mail and news posts. It might take hours to days for a recipient to receive an email, but it would eventually arrive, enough for the first flowering of Internet traffic \u2013 when hundreds of thousands of individuals, connected through their institutions, began to share socially at scale.<\/p>\n Among all the services accessible through UUCP, the electronic mail program \u2013 known as \u2018sendmail\u2019 has always been notorious. It\u2019s hard to keep working (clever geeks built successful careers as \u2018sendmail whisperers\u2019) and has a range of features that make it powerful \u2013 and potentially dangerous.<\/p>\n At 8.30 PM EST on the 2nd of November, 1988, a Cornell graduate student named Robert Morris launched a program on a computer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology designed to exploit one of the weaknesses of sendmail. The program would use the UUCP-sendmail connection to get access to a remote computer\u2019s operating system, then copy itself to that remote system, and launch itself there. On each system Morris\u2019 program walked an \u2018address book\u2019 of other systems, dialing those systems, exploiting sendmail, copying itself, and moving on to the next system.\u00a0<\/p>\n The infection grew geometrically, as infected systems infected system that infected systems, but because UUCP operates slowly, it took some time before a significant number of computers had been \u2018infected\u2019 with what became known as the \u2018Morris Worm<\/a>\u2018. Very quickly, around ten percent of the roughly 60,000 systems thousands of systems connected via UUCP had been infected with the Worm.<\/p>\n Repairing the damage took weeks, as the systems had to be taken offline and \u2018disinfected\u2019 \u2013 something which could often be a multi-day process. A year later, Morris found himself convicted under a new \u2018Computer Fraud and Abuse Act\u2019, serving a jail term \u2013 before joining the tenured faculty at MIT as a professor of computer science.<\/p>\n