History: Xerox PARC Worm

A piece of history for everyone. Researchers at Xerox PARC had been experimenting with worms to create a distributed computing environment in their experimental network. This idea worked well until one morning ...  The topic of the Xerox PARC worm came up yesterday during a phone call with someone regarding Dave Aitel's Nematode idea.

The "worm" programs were an experiment in the development of distributed computations: programs that span machine boundaries and also replicate themselves in idle machines. A "worm" is composed of multiple "segments," each running on a different machine. The underlying worm maintenance mechanisms are responsible for maintaining the wormmfinding free machines when needed and replicating the program for each additional segment. These techniques were successfully used to support several real applications, ranging from a simple multimachine test program to a more sophisticated real-time animation system harnessing multiple machines.

Source: The "Worm" Programs Early Experience with a Distributed Computation, John F. Shoch and Jon A. Hupp, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, 1982.

I cover this worm a bit in my book, but for a nice overall history of Xerox PARC read Dealers of Lightning : Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age, by Michael A. Hiltzik.