Richard "Rich" Skrenta (born 1967 , in Pittsburgh , Pennsylvania ) is a programmer and author of what is considered the first in-the-wild computer virus : Elk Cloner virus that infected Apple II computers in 1981 .
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Received a diploma from Northwestern University . From 1989 to 1991, he worked at Commodore Business Machines with Amiga Unix . Between 1991 and 1995, he worked at Unix System Labs, and from 1996 to 1998 with IP-level encryption at Sun Microsystems . He later left Sun and co-founded the Open Directory Project . Simultaneously with the work on the Catalog, he worked at Netscape Search, AOL Music and AOL Shopping.
He was also involved in VMS Monster, the former multi-user world for VMS . VMS Monster was the inspiration for TinyMUD . He is also known for his role in developing TASS , a prototype of tin , a popular threaded Usenet newsreader for Unix systems.
In 1989, he began work on a new multiplayer game. In 1994, it was launched under the name Olympia , as a paid game from Shadow Island Games . From 2002 to 2007 he served as executive director at Topix.net .
See also
- Open directory project
Links
- http://www.skrenta.com/
- http://www.topix.net/
- Richard Skrenta (inaccessible link) - creator of DMOZ, releases Blekko