Robert Tappan Morris, Jr. is a computer programmer (now a professor at MIT) who attained notoriety by writing and releasing
Morris Worm in
1988. This was the first
computer worm to spread widely on the Internet. He was convicted of this crime on
January 22,
1990.
According to the Jargon File:
- RTM /R-T-M/
- [Usenet: abbreviation for `Read The Manual'] ...
- 2. Robert Tappan Morris, perpetrator of the great Internet worm of 1988 (see Great Worm); villain to many, naive hacker gone wrong to a few. Morris claimed that the worm that brought the Internet to its knees was a benign experiment that got out of control as the result of a coding error. After the storm of negative publicity that followed this blunder, Morris's username on ITS was hacked from RTM to RTFM.