Robert Tappan Morris, Jr. |
Robert Tappan Morris, Jr. is a computer programmer and is currently a professor at MIT. He attained notoriety by
writing and releasing Morris Worm on November 2, 1988. This was the first computer worm to spread widely on the Internet.
Worm
Interestingly, Morris was the son of Robert Morris Sr., who was the chief security expert of National Security Agency (NSA) at that time.
Morris claimed that the worm that brought the Internet to its knees was a benign experiment that got out of control as the
result of a coding error. After the storm of negative publicity that followed this blunder, Morris's username on ITS was hacked
from RTM to RTFM.
A federal grand jury indicted then Cornell University student Morris on July 26, 1989 for releasing the worm. He thus became the first person to be prosecuted under the 1986 Computer
Fraud and Abuse Act. He was convicted of this crime on January 22, 1990, and sentenced to three years' probation, 400 hours' community service, and a $10,000
fine.
Viaweb
Morris joined Paul Graham to create a start-up company called Viaweb which sold a tool for creating online stores.
Viaweb was novel for two reasons: first, it's software was one of the first web applications (thus the name, "via Web"), and second, much of the software was written in Lisp.
Morris worked mostly on the ordering system, which was written in C.
Viaweb was later sold to Yahoo! for a large amount, but their product lives on as
Yahoo! Store
MIT
Morris is now an assistant professor at MIT, where he works in the Parallel and Distributed Operating Systems (PDOS) group
creating innovative new tools for networks.
External links
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