Robert Tappan Morris

Robert Tappan Morris (born November 8, 1965) is an American computer scientist and entrepreneur, an associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, where he received tenure in 2006. He holds a BA from Harvard University and a PhD from Cornell University. He is best known for creating the Morris worm in 1988, described as the first computer worm on the Internet, which led to his prosecution and conviction under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act as the first person convicted under that statute, receiving three years probation, 400 hours of community service and a fine. He later cofounded the company Viaweb, sold to Yahoo, and the venture capital firm Y Combinator, both with Paul Graham and other partners. He was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2019 and became a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery in 2015 for contributions to computer networking, distributed systems and operating systems.