alt Hacker NewsFrom the Wikipedia article:
Clifford Stoll, author of The Cuckoo's Egg, wrote that "Rumors have it that [Morris] worked with a friend or two at Harvard's computing department (Harvard student Paul Graham sent him mail asking for 'Any news on the brilliant project')".
Has pg commented on this?
Replies
tomhow • 11/04/2025
He's referred to it a few times in essays:
https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Apaulgraham.com+%22mor...
quickthrowman • 11/04/2025
A bit of an aside from The Cuckoo’s Egg;
It’s been a long time since I read the book, but IIRC Cliff visited with Robert Morris (rtm’s dad) at the NSA when he traveled to Washington DC, and I think the worm and rtm are mentioned after he meets with the elder Robert.
PG spoke about the worm a bit in an interview here: https://aletteraday.substack.com/p/letter-85-paul-graham-and...
Some quotes from that:
> The worm, no one would have ever known that the worm existed, except there was a bug in it. That was the problem. The worm itself was absolutely harmless. But there was a bug in the code that controlled the number of copies that would spread to a given computer. And so the computer would get like 100 copies of the worm running on it, back in the day, when having 100 processes running on your computer would be enough to crash it.
>he called me and told me what had happened.