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  • I'm pretty sure Paul Graham was directly involved in this story (not in any bad, culpable way, but enough that, were a film to be made about it, a well-known actor would be cast for his part).

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38020635

    by tptacek
  • That was one scary exciting day (source: was running machines at MIT at the time)
    by yodon
  • The 10% number is completely made up. According to Paul Graham, "I was there when this statistic was cooked up, and this was the recipe: someone guessed that there were about 60,000 computers attached to the Internet, and that the worm might have infected ten percent of them."
    by Chinjut
  • When i worked at Convex, there was an unnatural mania that fingerd be disabled and all sendmail patches be applied as quickly as possible. When I asked why, the answer started with "well... a couple of years ago there was this guy from the east coast who worked here for a year..."
    by OhMeadhbh
  • A good account is With Microscope and Tweezers: The Worm from MIT's Perspective [1], published in CACM a few months after the event. Notice it was the worm.

    I was an intern at IBM in '88 and they shut-down the (iirc) two internet getaways to their corporate network (vnet) while people figured out what was going on. News moved slowly back then, and the idea of self-replicating software was unusual. Although IBM had had its own replicator the previous year [2].

    [1] https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~gskc/security/rochlis89microsco...

    [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_Tree_EXEC

    by andyjohnson0
  • I assume you all know that Robert Morris is one of the YC (and Viaweb) cofounders? [1] Together with Paul Graham, Jessica Livingston, and Trevor Blackwell.

    [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Tappan_Morris

    by wslh
  • I followed his course 6.5840 on distributed systems (https://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.824/, YouTube videos at https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrw6a1wE39_tb2fErI4-WkMbs...) and completed the labs. One day, out of curiosity, I looked up his name. Then I realized what a legend he is.

    Great course by the way.

    by rs186
  • I used to keep a vt100 at the head of my bed, roll over and check on things a few times at night. 3am and everything is screwed. can't really log in anyplace, or start any jobs. The bus doesn't run until 5:30, so I just get dressed and walk across the bridge the to lab. Visitors center isn't open, so I just sneak through the exit by the guardhouse. They're civilian contractors, they either don't see me, or recognize me and don't care.

    Since it's all locked up, I just reboot the big vax single user - that takes about 10 minutes so I also start on a couple of the suns. You have to realize that everything including desktops runs sendmail in this era, and when some of these machines come up they are ok for a sec and then sendmail starts really eating into the cpu.

    I'm pretty bleary eyed but I walk around restarting everything single and taking sendmail out of the rcs. The TMC applications engineer comes in around 7 and gets me a cup of coffee. He manages to get someone to pick up in Cambridge and they tell him that's happening everywhere.

    by convolvatron

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