Excerpt from the Wikipeida article about the worm's author:<p><i>Morris is an American professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He co-founded the online store Viaweb, one of the first web-based applications, with Paul Graham.</i><p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Tappan_Morris" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Tappan_Morris</a>
This isn't the actual source code. As far as I know, only a small piece of the real worm's code ever got published, and that was in the Cornell Report, Cornell University's post mortem. This isn't the code in the Cornell Report.<p>Someone in 1989 or 1990 ran an ad in the back of "2600" magazine, selling the source code on paper. I bought a copy back then, I can remember the date because of the apartment I was in when I read the code. I think the "2600" version is the same as this one, but with someone different header comments.<p>I have a copy of this code from a tar archive with date of 1991-06-05 on it, so it's been floating around the Internet for almost 20 years at this point.
according to legend, this was supposed to be merely a proof of concept, but a bug in the code caused it to replicate uncontrollably. does anybody know what that bug was?