Rich skrenta common crawl

Richard skrenta elk cloner
Rich Skrenta is CEO of blekko, a new search engine startup.
Computer programmer and Silicon Valley entrepreneur.

•

Rich Skrenta
CEO
blekko

Rich Skrenta is CEO of blekko, a new search engine startup. Previously he was founder and CEO of Topix, the leading online news community. Prior to Topix, Rich headed up engineering for a variety of products within AOL, including AOL Shopping, AOL Music and Netscape Search. Prior to AOL, Rich was the co-founder and CEO of NewHoo, which was acquired by Netscape and renamed the Open Directory Project. The ODP is the world's largest human edited directory of the web and used by Google, Yahoo, AOL and many other companies. Rich was an engineering manager at Sun Microsystems prior to NewHoo and has also had development roles at Unix Systems Labs and the Amiga UNIX Group at Commodore Business Machines. Rich holds a patent in network security, and has authored many well-known pioneering software efforts, including some early multi-user online games. Rich graduated from Northwestern University with a degree in Computer Science.

•

Rich Skrenta

American computer programmer (born 1967)

Rich Skrenta
Skrenta in 2009
Born	Richard J. Skrenta Jr. (1967-06-06) June 6, 1967 (age 57) Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States
Nationality	American
Occupation(s)	Computer programmer, entrepreneur
Known for	Creating blekko and elk cloner

Richard J. Skrenta Jr. (born June 6, 1967) is an American computer programmer and Silicon Valleyentrepreneur who created the web search engineblekko.^[1]

Early life and education

Skrenta Jr. was born in Pittsburgh on June 6, 1967. In 1982, at age 15, as a high school student at Mt. Lebanon High School, Skrenta wrote the Elk Cloner virus that infected Apple II computers. It is widely believed to have been one of the first large-scale self-spreading personal computer viruses ever created.^[2]

In 1989, Skrenta graduated with a B.A. in computer science from Northwestern University.^[3]

Career

Between 1989 and 1991, Skrenta worked at Commodore Business Machines with Amiga Unix.^{[citation neede}

•

Elk Cloner

Microcomputer virus

Elk Cloner is one of the first known microcomputer viruses that spread "in the wild", i.e., outside the computer system or laboratory in which it was written.^[1]^[2]^[3]^[4] It attached itself to the Apple IIoperating system and spread by floppy disk. It was written around 1982 by programmer and entrepreneur Rich Skrenta as a 15-year-old high school student, originally as a joke, and put onto a game disk.

Infection and symptoms

Elk Cloner spread by infecting the Apple DOS 3.3 operating system using a technique now known as a boot sector virus. It was attached to a program being shared on a disk (usually a game). At set numbers of times the disk's program had been run (all multiples of 5), it would cause various strange behaviors of the Apple II, many requiring a reboot to correct. Most noticeably, every 50th time the program was run, instead of executing normally, it would change to a blank screen that displayed a poem about the virus. If a computer booted from an infected floppy disk, a copy of t