leres@ace.ee.lbl.gov (Craig Leres) (03/26/91)
Months ago, someone flipped me the June 1990 issue of PC/Computing. It
contains an article titled "The Shockwave Rider" by Jonathan Littman
that's about the Internet worm.
The article is very detailed but contains several factual anomalies. My
favorite talks about "load average":
One hour and 24 minutes after its release, the worm squirmed its
way across the country and into the computers of a Santa Monica
defense contractor, the Rand Corporation.
In two hours, it hit the major gateway at the University of
California, Berkeley; the Lawrence Livermore Laboratories, in
Berkeley and Livermore; and the Los Alamos National Laboratory, in
New Mexico. Very quickly it became apparent that something had gone
terribly wrong. Individual machines became infected by not one or
two but several worms. Then, the infection erupted.
Since university and military computers are rarely used so late at
night, they generally register only a 1 or 2 load average of a
possible 100. But by 9:21 p.m. PST, computers at the University of
Utah had already documented a load of 5. Twenty minutes later, the
load reached 7; in another 20 minutes, 16; and incredibly, in just
another five minutes, the system topped out at 100, choking to a
standstill.
The reference to "the Lawrence Livermore Laboratories" is also pretty
amusing. People are always mixing up my site with the one in Livermore;
this article seems to suggest that we're a colony of Livermore! The
truth is that we're more like peers. (And there is no such thing as
"the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratories" or "the Lawrence Livermore
Laboratories"; the only time it's appropriate to use the plural is when
you talk about both as in "the Lawrence Laboratories.")
Craig