#1 Antivirus Software

**1949–1980 period (pre-antivirus days)-- Although the roots of the computer virus date back as early as 1949, when the Hungarian scientist John von Neumann published the "Theory of self-reproducing automata", the first known computer virus appeared in 1971 and was dubbed the "Creeper virus". This computer virus infected Digital Equipment Corporation's operating system. The Creeper virus was eventually deleted by a program created by Ray Tomlinson and known as "The Reaper". Some people consider "The Reaper" the first antivirus software ever written – it may be the case, but it is important to note that the Reaper was actually a virus itself specifically designed to remove the Creeper virus. The Creeper virus was followed by several other viruses. The first known that appeared "in the wild" was "Elk Cloner", in 1981, which infected Apple II computers. In 1983, the term "computer virus" was coined by Fred Cohen in one of the first ever published academic papers on computer viruses. Cohen used the term "computer virus" to describe a program that: "affect other computer programs by modifying them in such a way as to include a copy of itself. The first IBM PC compatible "in the wild" computer virus, and one of the first real widespread infections, was "Brain" in 1986. From then, the number of viruses has grown exponentially. Most of the computer viruses written in the early and mid-1980s were limited to self-reproduction and had no specific damage routine built into the code.