The Black Forest

1338. Submitted on 2006/4/12, 10.19 h by wrlrd:

Black Thursday

On November 3, 1988 system administrators around the country came to work and discovered that their networks of computers were laboring under a huge load. If they were able to log in and generate a system status listing, they saw what appeared to be dozens or hundreds of "shell" (command interpreter) processes. If they tried to kill the processes, they found that new processes appeared faster than they could kill them. Rebooting the computer seemed to have no effect within minutes after starting up again, the machine was overloaded by these mysterious processes.

These systems had been invaded by the worm and the internet almost seized to exist.

There are 5 comments to this post (the latest by Dave on 2006/4/13, 0.35 h).