First published: 31st July 2007
The first personal computer virus, Elk Cloner, which spread on Apple II computers, is 25 years old this month. It is thought a 15-year-old high school student from Pittsburgh released it in July 1982. However, the idea of self-replicating code can be traced to a 1947 paper on self-replicating automata by John von Neumann, and the term computer virus was not used until about 1983 by Frederick Cohen.