

Living With the Computer Whiz Kids - byrneseyeview
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=940DEFD8133BF93BA35752C1A96E948260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all

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eugenejen
I am pretty amazed that PG said what he has always been saying since 20 years
ago. Thanks to New York Times to open their archive. I was then in the other
side on Earth. I remember then my friends and I were so impressed by what RTM
did then. (Taiwan then had not yet been hooked up into Internet, we only had a
BITNET in my university reserved for CS and graduate school faculty and
students, and I was a sophomore in Physics dept with two VT200 to VAX with
9600 baud line, and to us some guy could write such a cool program in a
naughty sense was like GOD.) I never had a chance to read this article in New
York Times in print then. I was too lazy to walk into our library to read the
archive. It is really funny 20 years later to read this piece. And it also
reminds me how many things have changed since Internet becomes a commodity in
first world.

\-- edit--

Now I need to imagine what will happen if 3 billion people in the world
connected with Internet in next 10 years.

------
wmf
"if the release of the ''virus'' prompts measures like a tightening of
computer security, the country's economy could be harmed, rather than helped"

How far we have fallen.

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tptacek
Read Katie Hafner's work (in "Cyberpunk") on what happened with the Morris
Worm very carefully, and Paul Graham's involvement with that incident seems a
bit more interesting.

~~~
byrneseyeview
"Ha!" I thought. "Why buy the book when I can just cleverly search Google for
the right keywords?" But then:
[http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&suggon=0&client=f...](http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&suggon=0&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-
US%3Aofficial&hs=QSp&q=Katie+Hafner+Cyberpunk+%22paul+graham%22&btnG=Search) .
This is getting to be more of a problem: people pose questions to a bigger
audience than they pose answers to, so Google is likely to find the question
rather than the answer.

~~~
parenthesis
<http://www.buzzle.com/editorials/10-10-2005-78536.asp>

> ... Morris enlisted the help of a friend at Harvard to stop the contagion.

Could this be?

~~~
pg
No, that was Andy Sudduth, who was sysadmin at Aiken then.

------
blader
"brought down the Department of Defense Arpanet computer network last week for
a day and a half"

So RTM literally brought down the internet?

~~~
eugenejen
Just read this. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_worm> Most TCP/IP mail
servers had to be shut down then and patched. At that time, the majority tasks
of internet are Email, Usenet and FTP.

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martythemaniak
Neat. I knew about the Morris worm, but never connected it with YC's Morris.

~~~
wmf
Yeah, for some reason he forgot to list "I accidentally crashed the Internet"
as an accomplishment on his home page.

