Robert Tappan Morris is best known for a program he released as a graduate student in the fall of 1988. The Second Circuit opinion in United States v. Morris records that he was “a first-year graduate student in Cornell University’s computer science Ph.D. program” who released a worm onto the Internet that caused computers “to ‘crash’ or cease functioning.” His conviction under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986 was affirmed on appeal in 1991, making it the first felony conviction under that law.
The court record describes his stated intent: Morris built the worm “to demonstrate the inadequacies of current security measures on computer networks,” but a flaw in how it replicated caused it to spread far more aggressively than he planned. He was sentenced to probation, community service, and a fine rather than prison.
Morris went on to a substantial career in research and industry. The member listing of MIT’s Parallel and Distributed Operating Systems group at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) names “Professor Robert Morris” among its group leaders, where his research centers on operating systems, networks, and distributed and storage systems. He is also widely known as a co-founder of the startup accelerator Y Combinator.
His arc - from the author of the Internet’s first major worm to a tenured MIT professor - made him one of the more unusual figures in the early history of computer security.