Fascinating! I didn't know that. Telescript was the networking software and it's not even mentioned in the movie. I thought it was crazy when I worked there. It had the structure of a virus.
Telescript was an amazingly cool idea. I almost quit a very good job to go to work for GM and work on Telescript. In retrospect, it was indeed a language whose purpose was writing [benevolent] viruses but it had no security whatsoever (or at best very little).