Robert Tappan Morris

Robert Tappan Morris ( born November 8, 1965) is an American computer scientist. Since 1999 he is professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He is best known as the author of the first Internet worm Morris.

Biography

Morris gained on 2 November 1988 at the age of 23 years a certain general level of awareness through the programming of the first computer worm, which spread widely on the Internet. His father, Robert H. Morris was head of the National Security Agency ( NSA) belonging to National Computer Security Center at that time.

The former graduate student at Cornell University was identified on 26 July 1989 as a releaser of the Morris worm. This worm more due to a programming error from their task, the count of computers, from and spread rapidly, so he took up to 10% of the then Internet traffic. Robert Tappan Morris was sentenced on 22 January 1990 to three years' probation, 400 hours of social work and 10,050 U.S. dollar fine. Furthermore, Morris was the court costs in the amount of approximately U.S. $ 150,000.

After studying computer science, Morris founded in 1995, the software company Viaweb, which he sold for $ 49 million to Yahoo in 1998. He became a professor at MIT and founded in 2005 with Paul Graham, Trevor Blackwell, and Jessica Livingston, the founder of Y Combinator center. 2010 Morris was awarded the Mark Weiser Award.

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