What is the origin and historical development of computer viruses, from theoretical concept to widespread digital threat?

-Karthik Gurumurthy

I’ve always been fascinated by how computer viruses evolved throughout computing history. The concept traces back to 1949 when John von Neumann theorized that computer programs could self-reproduce in his paper on complicated automata.

This idea first became reality in the 1950s with Bell Labs’ “Core Wars” game, where programmers created software “organisms” to compete for computer control. Science fiction popularized the concept further in the 1970s through novels like “Shockwave Rider” and “Adolescence of P-1,” which imagined software transferring between computers undetected.

The term “virus” wasn’t formally defined until 1986 when Fred Cohen’s Ph.D. thesis described it as “a program that can infect other programs by modifying them to include a, possibly evolved, version of itself.” Computer viruses remained mostly theoretical curiosities until 1988, when everything changed with Robert Morris’s “Internet Worm” that disabled mainframes worldwide. Interestingly, Morris’s father had worked on those original Core Wars games decades earlier.

Once the media witnessed tiny code taking down massive systems, computer viruses captured public imagination permanently. From theoretical concept to global security threat, the evolution happened faster than anyone anticipated.