Desirae

History of computer viruses
“Like any other field in computer science, viruses have evolved -a great deal indeed- over the years. In the series of press releases which start today, we will look at the origins and evolution of malicious code since it first appeared up to the present.

Going back to the origin of viruses, it was in 1949 that Mathematician John Von Neumann described self-replicating programs which could resemble computer viruses as they are known today. However, it was not until the 60s that we find the predecessor of current viruses. In that decade, a group of programmers developed a game called **Core Wars**, which could reproduce every time it was run, and even saturate the memory of other players' computers. The creators of this peculiar game also created the first antivirus, an application named **Reeper**, which could destroy copies created by Core Wars.

However, it was only in 1983 that one of these programmers announced the existence of **Core Wars**, which was described the following year in a prestigious scientific magazine: this was actually the starting point of what we call computer viruses today.”