David L. Smith
New Jersey programmer who released Melissa in March 1999, the macro virus that showed what Word and Outlook could achieve as a team.
Melissa lived in a Word document first posted to Usenet, dressed up as a list of passwords for adult sites. Opening it ran a macro that mailed the document to the first 50 contacts in Outlook. Several large companies shut down their mail servers to stem the flood. The virus was reportedly named after a stripper in Florida.
Smith was arrested on 1 April 1999 and sentenced in 2002 to 20 months in federal prison. Part of the deal was cooperation: he helped the FBI track down other virus writers. Melissa was the dress rehearsal for ILOVEYOU a year later, which used the same recipe with a nastier payload.