Notes on  GREAT WORM 

The 1988 Internet WORM perpetrated by RTM. This is a play on
Tolkien (compare ELVISH, ELDER DAYS). In the fantasy history of
his Middle Earth books, there were dragons powerful enough to lay
waste to entire regions; two of these (Scatha and Glaurung) were
known as "the Great Worms". This usage expresses the connotation that
the RTM crack was a sort of devastating watershed event in hacker
history; certainly it did more to make non-hackers nervous about the
Internet than anything before or since.

J3N Research Labs

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