Your title is incorrect. He postulated on the possibility in 1949. It says so in the very article you linked.

It would have been impossible for a virus to operate on a computer then. Programs had to be hard wired into those early computers.

I'm hoping I'm not the only one singing "welcome to the dungeon, we've got fun and games! " In my head

Apparently not even OP can be bothered to read the article.

Hello fellow brain nerd.

I don’t blame them. I didn’t. I was waiting for decent commentary to distill the finer points of the article, meld those tidbits with both common and industry insider insights to produce a nugget of re-spewable intellect that could be foisted upon unwitting folks.

BS title.

Leading to the popular saying among programmers, "hello, Neumann!"

"Project Rainbow" Jon Von Neumann?

He made a ship disappear earlier too...

Exactly. The Computer Program for the Apollo Moon Landing was hard-wired (ie: "woven").

It's not a virus! It's a virtual Von-Neumann probe!

Not sure you understand how computer science works. Von Neumann didn’t postulate the existence of self-replicating programs, he proved their existence by making one. The fact that it wasn’t running on the computers of the time doesn’t change that algorithmic result.

It also says in the article linked,

> Von Neumann's design for a self-reproducing computer program is considered the world's first computer virus, and he is considered to be the theoretical "father" of computer virology.

And the source is a CS textbook on viruses.

Sorry to be harsh but your attempt at correcting OP is a Dunning-Kruger thing IMO.

Did you guys read the article? It says

> Von Neumann's design for a self-reproducing computer program is considered the world's first computer virus, and he is considered to be the theoretical "father" of computer virology.

and it cites a CS textbook on viruses

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> theoretical

a blueprint is not a building.

For a long time algorithms were developed and proven on paper before running on computers. That’s how Ada Lovelace made the first software, and how Alan Turing did most of his work. Von Neuman did that with viruses, and computer scientists say he made the first virus.

You can develop a sorting algorithm and mathematically prove that it works, and how fast entirely on pen and paper. That’s how a lot of computer science has always been done.

Yes, I've done it; I wrote a whole online messaging system while 15 miles from the nearest computer.

still only theoretical.

Theoretical CS isn’t like, speculating what’s possible in the sci fi future. It‘s making rigorous mathematical proofs about algorithms.

And this whole thread was about whether OP read the article lol. The article plainly says what OP said, and computer science textbooks agree. If you want to have a philosophical debate about if a program has to run on silicon in order to exist, go ahead, but know that the experts decided that one long ago and side with OP.

No, "reflections on trusting trust" was it. You infect the compiler so that when it compiles the new compiler it replicates itself.

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rdriley/487/papers/Thompson_1984_ReflectionsonTrustingTrust.pdf

You're misidentifying theoretical and speculative. You can have theoretical proof of something. Cf. Einstein's vindication that light bends.

Irrelevant distinction, it wasn't 'developed' as in actually programmed into the computer by him.

the concept was developed, but not the actual virus.

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You can absolutey write a program or algorithm without running it on a computer. Turing published Turing machines long before they ran on silicon, and Ada Lovelace wrote software for a computer that wasn’t built in her lifetime. The first virus implemented in Assembly directly cited and built out Von Neumann’s work.

Later in 2020 the coronavirus proved that idiots are capable of replicating themselves

I would argue that unless you can sit at a terminal and wonder why your program does not work, then make a trivial and meaningless change which causes it to work but should not, then you haven’t really written software.

Actually they could run on replaceable mechanical orderments, we had physical programming materials before the start of WW2... WW2 was the 5bit War.

Enigma was an example of orderment programming.

> I understand exactly how viruses work. I was responsible for delivering anti-virus definitions to 100s of 1000s computers in a very large network. In fact, I'm an author of a patent for software delivery.

Wow, appeal to authority, very smart.

Too bad you're objectively wrong, and those credentials are kind of pathetic.

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