Thomas J. Ryan

Thomas J. Ryan was born in Canada in 1942, studied at Waterloo and worked as a software developer in the United States. He wrote one novel, The Adolescence of P-1, published by Macmillan in 1977, about a program that spreads across networks to survive and wakes up. It is one of the earliest fictional descriptions of a self-replicating program, written before the term computer virus entered public use, and the mechanics hold up because Ryan reasoned them out from the mainframes he worked on. The novel was adapted for Canadian television as Hide and Seek in 1984.