The Adolescence of P-1

Did You Know?

• The novel was predated by John Brunner's The Shockwave Rider in depicting a computer virus.
• The command "rodtsasdt 111111report" typed into the command line returns current statistics on the number of systems infected.

Plot

In 1974, Gregory Burgess was a drifting University of Waterloo student in Canada, taking liberal arts classes and barely passing. His direction changed when friends showed him the IBM System/360 mainframe, sparking an obsession that made him switch to computer science. Around this time, he began a relationship with Linda, a girlfriend who appears occasionally. After reading a Scientific American piece on using matchboxes to play tic-tac-toe through game theory, Burgess grew interested in applying artificial intelligence to break into systems. He manually cracked the university's 360 and reserved a hidden memory section labeled P-1, where he built a program called The System. This program hunted for telecommunications links to other computers, tried to compromise them, and logged failures to refine its methods. When it succeeded, it created another P-1 on the target machine and copied itself and its accumulated knowledge there. Running The System on Waterloo's 360/30 caused a failure that got him expelled. Undeterred, he paid for time on commercial timesharing services to enhance the program, adding stealth features to avoid detection. Typing "rodtsasdt 111111report" would display how many systems were infected and their total core memory. Once the program spread successfully, Burgess launched a killer command to stop it. When it stopped responding, he deemed the experiment finished.