ARPANET crashes and the Christmas Virus strikes. All on today’s On this Day from TEST Huddle.
1973 – ARPANET Crashes
ARPANET crashes when a programming bug causes all ARPANET traffic to be routed through the server at Harvard University and the server freezes.
1987 – The Christmas Virus strikes
The Christmas virus (Christmas Tree EXEC), the world’s first WAN virus as well as the first widely disruptive computer worm, begins to effect IBM computers around the globe. The virus draws a crude Christmas tree text graphic on the victim’s monitor and searches out other network users. The worm was written by a Clausthal University of Technology student in the REXX scripting language. The actual file name of the virus is CHRISTMA.EXEC because IBM systems only support eight-character filenames.
