Elk Cloner

Elk Cloner was the first known computer virus. It was written around 1982 by the then 15 -year-old U.S. student Rich Skrenta for the Apple II.

The virus was a boot sector virus and spread all over the boot sector infected floppy disks. If the computer was started from an infected disk, the virus wrote in the memory and if not yet infected disks were inserted into the drive, the virus wrote on the disks to spread further.

Each 50 floppy slot following text appears:

It will get on all your disks It will infiltrate your chips Yes, it's Cloner!

It will stick to you like glue It will modify RAM too

The computer had to be restarted for further use. Otherwise, nothing was damaged, only Apple -DOS disks, which were not based on the standard image were overwritten.

The virus reached great popularity in the public, for example, was in Time magazine reported it.