10 Fads on the Net

kuro5hin.org’s Top Ten Internet Fads:

5. The .sig Virus
Back in the days when everyone on the Internet was running UNIX from a command line, the way you would attach a “signature” to your E-mail was by creating a little text file called “.sig”. Whatever was in that file would be appended to outgoing E-mail.
Sometime after the Morris Worm, the first major “virus” (technically a worm) on the Internet, this (and similar) text started appearing at the bottom of people’s E-mails:
Hi, I’m a .sig virus! Copy me to your .sig file and help me propagate!
Of course, this was so cute and silly that lots of people really did copy it into their .sig files, allowing the .sig virus to propagate.
After a while, the novelty wore off, leaving the philosophy majors to argue that it really was, technically, a virus, since it contained instructions allowing it to self-replicate. It just happened that those instructions were carried out by a human rather than a computer. The computer science majors said, no, it’s just a meme, not a virus. The rest of us went on with our lives.

They also mention PointCast, which was really the progenitor of this all, wasn’t it?

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