Word: errors
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Friends of Morris at Harvard have said that the young computer wizard, fatigued from lack of sleep, made an error in his program that caused the virus to run amok, crippling literally thousands of mainframe computer systems...
...Morris' error, according to experts contactedyesterday, was that he instructed the virus tospread to every 10th, rather than every 100th,adjacent computer on the Internet. The result ofthis forgotten zero was that the number of copiesof the virus increased exponentially at astaggering rate, bogging down computers with itssheer size...
...hours of Thursday morning, Morris telephoned Andrew H. Sudduth '83-'85 and Paul Graham, a computer science graduate student, at Harvard's Aiken Computation Lab when he realized that a simple but critical error in his program had allowed a computer "virus" to spread rapidly out of control...
Graham, characterizing the experiment as beingborn out of "scientific curiosity" rather than"malicious curiosity," said that an error in theprogram caused the virus to mulitiply and spreadat a rapid rate from computer to computer. Heexplained that Morris had intended only for thevirus to have one copy in each computer withoutreplicating...
Friends said Morris was the unfortunate victimof a small programming error that made a minorexperiment turn into a national disaster...