Development
Elk Cloner was created as a prank in 1981 by Rich Skrenta, a 15-year-old high school student. Skrenta already had a notoriety among his friends because, in sharing computer games and software, he would often alter the floppy disks to shut down or display taunting on-screen messages. Due to this reputation for pranks, many of his friends simply stopped accepting floppy disks from him. Skrenta thought of methods to alter floppy disks without physically touching them. During a winter break from the Mt. Lebanon High School in Pennsylvania, United States, Skrenta discovered how to launch the messages automatically on his Apple II computer. He developed what is now known as a boot sector virus, and began circulating it in early 1982 among high school friends and a local computer club. 25 years later in 2007, Skrenta called it "some dumb little practical joke."
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