Rich Skrenta
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- Known for
- Elk Cloner (1982), Open Directory Project, Blekko
Wrote Elk Cloner at fifteen, one of the first computer viruses to spread in the wild — and went on to build search companies.
In 1982 Skrenta was a high-school student outside Pittsburgh with a habit of handing friends Apple II floppies whose games stopped working after a while. Elk Cloner lived in the boot sector, copied itself onto every fresh disk inserted, and on every fiftieth boot displayed a short poem: "Elk Cloner: The program with a personality". No damage, just annoyance — and a year before Fred Cohen coined the word "virus".
Skrenta later founded NewHoo, which Netscape bought and renamed the Open Directory Project, the news aggregator Topix and the search engine Blekko, acquired by IBM in 2015. As a student he also wrote Monster.