according to legend, this was supposed to be merely a proof of concept, but a bug in the code caused it to replicate uncontrollably. does anybody know what that bug was?
> The worm could have determined whether to invade a new computer by asking if there was already a copy running. But just doing this would have made it trivially easy to kill; everyone could just run a process that would answer "yes" when asked if there was already a copy, and the worm would stay away. The defense against this was inspired by Michael Rabin's mantra, "Randomization." To compensate for this possibility, Morris directed the worm to copy itself even if the response is "yes", 1 out of 7 times.[2] This level of replication proved excessive and the worm spread rapidly, infecting some computers multiple times. Morris remarked, when he heard of the mistake, that he "should have tried it on a simulator first."
-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_worm