Birthday computer virus and the atomic bomb

Hello! Usually we try to congratulate on the anniversaries of some important memorable events. Today is one of these days, but the events associated with it are very ambiguous. To congratulate them somehow the language does not turn. But not to mention them, we thought wrong.

First, probably July 16th can be considered the birthday of the world's first computer virus called Elk Cloner. But with this date, a very muddy story: a number of sources indicate numbers from July 13 to July 18, 1981, others claim that the virus was written in February 1982, and still others - in July 1982. The author himself also cannot remember the exact date or even a year . Confusion and vacillation, no specifics. We consulted and decided that the date for July 16 is closer to us.


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So, on this day, a 15-year-old school student, Richard Skrent, wrote a tiny program that was distributed through the boot sector of 5-inch floppy disks for Apple II personal computers. Elk Cloner, in fact, advertised this method of distribution among the broad masses of programmers. Moreover, in the "wild environment" Skrenta released his brainchild on floppy disks with pirated games. So Elk Cloner became also the founder of all real and imaginary dangers that await fans of illegal content.

The virus was generally harmless. Every 50 downloads, he displayed on the screen of an infected computer the following rhyme:



The work of Richard overwritten the backup floppy disk and, if desired, could destroy all user data, but such a mechanism was not provided for in the virus.

A number of sources mistakenly call The Creeper, the first virus written many years before Elk Cloner. However, formally The Creeper cannot be considered a virus, since it did not need a carrier file for distribution, it was an independent program.

This is what Richard Skrenta looks like these days:



The second event is exactly on July 16. Iron, this is not to miss and not forget. In 1945, the world's first atomic explosion was carried out at the Alamogordo test site.

16 milliseconds since detonation:



The test received the code name Trinity , the power of the explosion was about 20 kilotons. Somewhat later, on August 9 of the same year, a similar device in the form of a Fat Man bomb was dropped on Nagasaki.



After this event, the course of history has changed. It seems that everything remained the same, but now the man owned a weapon of incredible power and was eager to use it. The brainchild of a team of nuclear physicists marked the beginning of a multi-year arms race and launched the most complex chain of events that brought the world to its present state. Today, nuclear power makes up a significant share in the production of electricity (in Russia - about 17%). In addition, with careful handling, it is one of the most environmentally friendly technologies. And the experience of using nuclear reactors in space allows us to hope that over the next 20-30 years, we will be able to create spacecraft with much more capabilities than the best modern samples.