Robert Tappan Morris was born in 1965 and grew up in Millington, New Jersey, the son of Robert Morris Sr., a Bell Labs researcher who helped design Multics and Unix and later became chief scientist of the National Computer Security Center, part of the NSA. As a high schooler at the Delbarton School he was already cracking passwords. In 1988, as a first-year graduate student at Cornell, he released a self-spreading program from MIT’s network to hide its origin. The worm used three weaknesses: the debug mode of Sendmail, a buffer overflow in the fingerd service, and trusted remote execution through rexec and rsh. Morris said he only wanted to measure the internet, but he coded the worm to copy itself 14 percent of the time even onto machines that reported being infected, and repeated infections froze systems across academic, military and research networks. Damage estimates ran as high as $10 million.
In 1989 Morris became the first person indicted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. His 1990 sentence was three years of probation, 400 hours of community service and a $10,050 fine, and the conviction was upheld on appeal. He earned a Harvard PhD in 1999 under H.T. Kung with a thesis on scalable TCP congestion control. In 1995 he and Paul Graham founded Viaweb, which generated online storefronts on the server using software written in Lisp; Yahoo bought it for $49 million in 1998 and renamed it Yahoo Store. Morris joined MIT’s faculty in 1999 and received tenure in 2006. In 2005 he co-founded Y Combinator with Graham, Jessica Livingston and Trevor Blackwell, which backed companies including Airbnb, Stripe and Dropbox.
- Y Combinator’s batch model gave groups of startups about $20,000 each, three months of advice and a demo day.
- At MIT Morris co-authored Chord, a distributed hash table protocol that reroutes around failed nodes.
- Morris and Graham released Arc, a dialect of Lisp, in 2008, and Graham named the markup language RTML after Morris.
- Graham has called Morris a personal hero who is “never wrong.”
- Morris won the Mark Weiser Award in 2010, became an ACM Fellow in 2014 and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2019.
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