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then be done in relatively small, incremental steps, almost a mutation in the approach to systems development. In addition, as we have previously mentioned, at least one new species of operating system emerged from UNIX based on an open source philosophy; this was the Linux system.

Personal computers emerged as a rather natural result of the progression of miniaturization of electronic components and circuitry. The development of large-scale integrated circuits allowed a fully competent central processing unit to be implemented on a single chip; memory and various interface units were similarly available. Surprisingly enough however, the development and deployment of personal computers also exhibited an almost purely social aspect. The fact that small computers could apparently do things that previously only big computers could do, and could do them with smaller machines that cost a lot less money, was apparently not a sufficient justification in the marketplace for such machines to take off. The earliest personal computers were the products of a variety of start-up companies, and the modest successes that they had involved mostly the establishment of niche markets. Finally, the entire genre was legitimized when IBM offered their first personal computer line in the late 1970’s. It was most interesting that in offering this basic computer platform, IBM, the developer of the most powerful operating systems then known for large and mid-range computers, chose to go to an outside vendor for the operating system of the personal computer. This unknown quantity was Microsoft and the operating system was the Disk Operating System, generally known by its acronym MS-DOS.

If one were going to design an operating system that was the antithesis of the mainframe operating system, MS-DOS might have been the natural result. Perhaps this was the prescient decision of IBM; it’s hard for a mammal to build a cockroach. MS-DOS was an operating system devoid of security but offering extremely efficient propagation characteristics. One could almost think of it as a virus turned loose in a world of large, well-developed organic life forms. The technical expertise required for managing the installation and support of this software component was minimal. Therefore, the system had a natural characteristic that made it a trivial target for malicious software; it had a standard boot procedure that allowed the personal computer user to invoke specific executable programs automatically when the computer was powered up. This batch control file, or BAT file, allowed the invocation of any number of executable images. Consequently, all a piece of malicious software had to do was get its name listed within the BAT file. The earliest computer viruses, once placed into execution on a system, merely wrote their invocation sequence into the BAT file and then proceeded to propagate themselves to various places on the hard drive or floppy disks of the personal computer. From a computer security standpoint, it was as if a large bull’s-eye and the words “Attack Me Here!” marked the most vulnerable parts of the system! However, the propagation characteristics of these systems were indeed akin to cockroaches; they quickly overran the domiciles of mainframes and even mini-computers.

In a startling degree of synchronicity with the explosive deployment of personal computers came the emergence of the communication protocols called TCP/IP from the development nooks and crannies of the Arpanet. When these protocols were included as standard components of personal computer operating systems, the explosion of the Internet began.

Then, seemingly out of the blue came another mutation event. As the anecdotal version of Isaac Newton’s discovery of gravity was stimulated by an apple falling on his head, so was the case of the computer world. Apple dropped on its collective head. Among the early start-up companies, offering their own variants of personal computers was Apple. The early Apple machines developed a strong following of pioneers in the use of personal computers. The real mutational event that was propagated by Apple was the introduction of the first low-end systems with

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