The Social Graph of Malware

Plato-IV terminal (1980s)

Before the early 1970s, a virus not only would have been unlikely to arise, it would have been practically useless, because there were few computers, and they were generally not connected to each other, so it was unlikely to spread. There were, of course, computers that supported thousands of time-sharing remote users, each connecting by modem and using computer terminals, but all of the computing was done in the central computers. An early example of this kind of system in an academic and teaching setting was the PLATO-IV system, with its computers in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois [USA] (and later Minneapolis), and thousands of PLATO-IV terminals distributed around the world. And later examples of central computers with large networks of terminals include the GE Time-Sharing systems using the BASIC language and a large complement of central computers. (AOL developed from this model as well.)

Because of the sparsity of connections, there would be no way a virus could spread from one computer to another.

With the rise of the ARPAnet (Wikipedia article), precursor to the global Internet, computers increasingly became interconnected I visited SRI early in the 1970s on the day that Doug Engelbart’s group at SRI first connected to the East Coast of the US through the nascient ARPAnet, and witnessed the excitement generated by the possibility of not only sharing programs, but communicating directly in real time from one software research lab to another all the way across the continent.