A worm or virus like Blaster or SoBig, a self-replicating program that can infect millions of computers, is but one event.

A doctoral student named Fred Cohen was the first to describe self-replicating programs designed to modify computers as viruses.

But at 5 a.m., all I knew was that my computers were bogged down and it's the fault of this self-replicating program.

Computer viruses and worms, essentially just self-replicating programs, were predicted as early as 1949 by the mathematician John von Neumann.

But some scientists are considering the possibility that these self-replicating programs might have constructive uses as well.

Creeper was an experimental self-replicating program written by Bob Thomas at BBN in 1971.

The standard terms for these programs in the computability theory and computer science literature are self-replicating programs, self-reproducing programs, and self-copying programs.

Virus authors took advantage of this to create the first self-replicating programs.

As a self-replicating program, the longer the system remained operational, the farther the programs spread.

Viruses are a self-replicating program that can attach itself to another program or file in order to reproduce.