1. The 20th-century is undoubtedly one of the turning points in the life of mankind. As a science fiction novelist once said, "mankind has rushed forward, like a whipped horse"; having defined themselves as a technocratic civilization, our grandfathers, our fathers and we ourselves had been giving all our abilities and our strength to the development of machines - from medical instruments to space ships to agricultural machinery to atomic power plants to transport to communication - this list is endless, because one can hardly name a single area of humankind's activity, not affected in any way by the development of machinery. What was a reason of such global and intensive progress? Military opposition, or evolutionary "brain growing" of humans, or humans' pathological laziness.
2. Mankind has been seized and charmed by machinery; a few people would agree to give up a modern automobile in favor of horse cart. Many people have already forgotten what an conventional mail is, with its paper envelopes and mail couriers - email took its place, delivering mail with unbelievable speed (up to several minutes irrespective of distances) and being very reliable. One cannot imagine modern society without computers, which are capable to increase the effectiveness of labor many times and deliver any imaginable information .Cellular phones are not unusual to us, let’s imagine that just ten years ago. The 20th century is one of the most controversial centuries. This is the age of paradoxes, the main one of which is man's attitude towards nature. Having ceased to being nature's friend, having conquered it and proved that he might easily destroy it, man suddenly realized, that he will die together with nature, and suddenly all the parts in the "mankind vs. nature" drama became mixed up. Having become a technocrat, man still believes in God (or in something similar). The most important technical phenomena of the 20th century are: man's journey into space, making use of atomic energy, revolutionary development of communication and information technology, and of course staggering development of micro- and macro-computers. And as far as computers are concerned, there always appears one more phenomenon of the end of the century - the phenomenon of computer viruses.
3. First of all, computer viruses present a serious and distinctive problem, which no one has expected. Science fiction writers began writing about viruses after the first actual virus had hit its first computer.
4. Second of all computer virus is the first attempt to create artificial life. A successful attempt, but wouldn’t call it useful - as for now the computer microorganisms are more like pests rather than anything else, creating all kinds of problems. But still this is life, because viruses have all the properties of a live organism. They can propagate, adapt themselves to environment, move etc (within computers only of course), just like conventional viruses can do the same within cells.
5. And third of all the subject of computer viruses stands aside from most computer related problems). Virtually all the problems which man solves using computers are a purposeful continuation of man's struggle with nature.
6. However fighting computer viruses is fighting one human intelligence with another (being in a sense just another form of the forces of nature, but there are more than one opinions on that). This fight is a fight of wits, because virologists face the tasks set by another people just like them. They invent new virus - we have to take care of it. Then they invent a new virus, which is very hard to crack - but we still have to take care of it. And even as we speak there definitely is a guy sitting in front of a computer and obsessed with producing another monster, which will have to be analyzed for a whole week and debug anti-virus algorithm for another week. Just like the evolution of live organisms, we see now that the appearance of computer viruses is one of the most interesting moments of the 20th century's technical progress.
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