Birth of the Antivirus Industry, The

The first known virus to appear in the wild was "Elk Cloner" in 1981, written as a joke for the popular Apple II computer of the time. Since there were no "cures" for it though, removal was difficult. The first widespread infection for the IBM PC was "(c)Brain" in 1986 by shareware developers in Pakistan, and was intended as a digital rights management scheme that went horribly wrong, destroying many hard drives, requiring complete reformatting and reinstalls (like "Popureb" just last week) and putting the developers out of business.