[jluxenberg]

Excerpt from the Wikipeida article about the worm's author:

Morris is an American professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He co-founded the online store Viaweb, one of the first web-based applications, with Paul Graham.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Tappan_Morris

[pg]

He also wrote a good chunk of the code you used to post this comment.

[brfox]

http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=rtm

[djcapelis]

He also worked on Chord, which became a basis for distributed hash tables and a few other things. He is as successful as a researcher as he has been with the whole gaining tenure and doing viaweb/ycombinator with pg thing.

Frankly he's up there with Steve Jobs and maybe Fabrice Bellard in terms of "people who I'd like to know what it is they're doing so right so consistently." It's the consistency that tends to surprise me.

[dustingetz]

"Robert Morris was tried and convicted of violating the 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. After appeals he was sentenced to three years probation, 400 hours of community service, and a fine of $10,000.[6]"