A Short History of Computer Viruses and Attacks

Source: Security Focus

1945: Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper discovers a moth trapped between relays
in a Navy computer. She calls it a "bug," a term used since the late 19th
century to refer to problems with electrical devices. Murray Hopper also coined
the term "debugging" to describe efforts to fix computer problems.

1949: Hungarian scientist John von Neumann (1903-1957) devises the
theory of self-replicating programs, providing the theoretical foundation for
computers that hold information in their "memory."

1960: AT&T introduces its Dataphone, the first commercial modem.

1963: Programmers develop the American Standard Code for Information
Interchange (ASCII), a simple computer language that allows machines
produced by different manufacturers to exchange data.

1964: AT&T begins monitoring telephone calls to try to discover the identities
of "phone freaks," or "phreakers," who use "blue boxes" as tone generators to
make free phone calls. The team's surveillance chief tells Newsweek magazine in
1975 that the company monitored 33 million toll calls to find phreakers. AT&T
scores 200 convictions by the time the investigation ends in 1970.

1969: Programmers at AT&T's Bell Laboratories develop the UNIX
operating system, the first multi-tasking operating system.