In January 1982, 15-year-old high school student and amateur programmer Rich Skrenta wrote a piece of code and saved it to a floppy disc. Originally intended as a practical joke, the code, dubbed ‘Elk Cloner’, would mark a significant moment in computing history.

Elk Cloner, as it so transpired, would become one of the first known computer viruses to spread “in the wild” – whereby it replicated outside the operating system or laboratory setting in which it was conceived.

The computer virus initially attached itself to the Apple II operating system, wreaking havoc on personal computers and causing quite a few headaches. So what exactly was Elk Cloner?

As a mischievous teenager in the 1980s, Skrenta had already forged a reputation among friends as something of a computer prankster – altering code on computer game discs which presented users with on-screen taunts and messages.

In fact, this habit of pulling pranks even led some friends to stop accepting floppy discs from Skrenta, prompting the teen to explore new methods and techniques through which to continue – and perhaps even fine-tune – the teasing.

“It was some dumb little practical joke,” he explained in a 2007 interview. “I guess if you had to pick between being known for this and not being known for anything, I’d rather be known for this.”

It was with an Apple II computer that Skrenta made history: tweaking, tampering and developing the unique ‘boot sector’ virus and distributing it among friends and acquaintances at school.

This particular type of virus targeted the boot sector of a target’s HDD, SSD or various storage mediums, such as flash drives or floppy discs.

Upon start-up, the virus implanted a copy of itself in the computer’s memory and, when the oblivious user then inserted another disc, the virus would replicate and copy itself onto the new host disc. Rinse and repeat.

In fact, every 50th time an infected disc was booted, a user was met with a blank screen and a poem about the virus which read:

“It will get on all your disks, it will infiltrate your chips, yes it’s a cloner!”

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An ingenious piece of primitive malware, Elk Cloner wasn’t quite the unpredictable and uncontrollable virus one might imagine.

When infecting a new device, it imprinted a signature byte to the host’s disc directory to show that a particular operating system had already been infected. This prevented the target operating system from being altered each time a disc was accessed.

It was through this process that users were eventually able to “inoculate” uninfected operating systems by writing the signature to the disc itself.

While Elk Cloner was undoubtedly irritating for those affected, the virus was relatively harmless and pales in comparison to modern viruses or those which followed, such as the Michelangelo virus from the early 1990s.

The emergence of Elk Cloner did mark a significant moment in computing history, however. As the one of the first self-replicating viruses to spread in the wild, many regard this as a pivotal shift in computer viruses, unlike previous examples which had been created in – and limited to – lab environments.

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