Tom Ryan would be pleased to hear it.
The Apotheosis of The Pirate BayBack in 1977, he wrote a book called
The Adolescence of P-1 in which a gradually "becoming sentient" AI program "hides" itself, and ultimately becomes virtually eradication-proof by packetizing and spreading itself through every network on the planet. The only way to kill it would be to shut down
everything on the planet simultaneously.
The book (along with Brunner's
Shockwave Rider ) is considered one of the earliest examples of someone using a computer worm/virus theme in science fiction. But IMO, what is even more interesting is how this novel anticipated so much of how interconnected - and vulnerable - our world would eventually become due to our reliance on data networks.
It's a good read too. And not too "dated" from a tech perspective. Despite its age, much of the technology posited in the story holds up remarkably well.
(Note: in the story there's a interesting section that talks about how the 'old' mainframes used to be administrated and operated. There's a part about putting up and taking down memory "partitions" and "queuing" jobs by a human "scheduler" that will look very similar to what those of use who use virtual machines now do on our own PCs. Just goes to show that little is ever really "new" when it comes to computers.)
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@Renegade: Apotheosis? You actually used
apotheosis in a sentence? I
love it!