<Tr> <Th> Point of origin </Th> <Td> Mt . Lebanon, Pennsylvania, United States </Td> </Tr> <Tr> <Th> Author (s) </Th> <Td> Rich Skrenta </Td> </Tr> <P> Elk Cloner is one of the first known microcomputer viruses that spread "in the wild", i.e., outside the computer system or laboratory in which it was written . It attached itself to the Apple II operating system and spread by floppy disk . It was written around 1982 by programmer and entrepreneur Rich Skrenta as a 15 - year - old high school student, originally as a joke, and put onto a game disk . </P> <P> Elk Cloner spread by infecting the Apple DOS 3.3 operating system using a technique now known as a boot sector virus . It was attached to a game which was then set to play . The 50th time the game was started, the virus was released, but instead of playing the game, it would change to a blank screen that displayed a poem about the virus named Elk Cloner . If a computer booted from an infected floppy disk, a copy of the virus was placed in the computer's memory . When an uninfected disk was inserted into the computer, the entire DOS (including Elk Cloner) would be copied to the disk, allowing it to spread from disk to disk . To prevent the DOS from being continually re-written each time the disk was accessed, Elk Cloner also wrote a signature byte to the disk's directory, indicating that it had already been infected . </P>

The first computer virus was created on an apple computer in