TWENTY-FIVE years ago today, two brothers in Pakistan came up with a new and novel way to catch out software pirates.
As it turned out, they also gave birth to one of the greatest annoyances in the modern world.
"Brain", considered to be the first major personal computer virus, was created on January 19, 1986, by Basit and Amjad Farooq Alvi at their computer shop in Lahore, Pakistan.
From there the program spread across the world — one infected floppy disk at a time.
At its peak Brain had even reached the offices of a government department in Canada, on the other side of the globe.
To this day there is speculation as to why Basit and Amjad created the virus. It appears to have been a way to stop software pirates.
"(Amjat) wanted a way to detect piracy, to catch someone who copies," Basit told TIME in 1988. His brother had written several custom software programs which were being copied without permission.
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