In the mid 1970's (about '74 or '75) a friend, Chuck Huffington, described to me a program purported to have been unleashed on the ARPAnet - a batch job whose sole purpose was to submit replicas of itself to other compatible systems (CDC Cyber's, perhaps) that it could identify on the net. The clever invention was named "Virus". According to Chuck, some SysAdmin somewhere had then written a similar program/job, the sole functions of were to replicate itself onto compatible systems, look around for instances of "Virus", evict them, and then evict itself. I was never sure at the time whether the story was true or a clever piece of science fiction, but the term "virus" was definitely in use in this context by 1975.
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