Robert Tappan Morris

Morris was born in 1965 to parents Robert Morris and Anne Farlow Morris. The senior Robert Morris was a computer scientist at Bell Labs, who helped design Multics and Unix; and later became the chief scientist at the National Computer Security Center, a division of the National Security Agency (NSA).

Morris grew up in the Millington section of Long Hill Township, New Jersey, attended The Peck School, and graduated from Delbarton School in 1983.

Morris attended Harvard University, and later went on to graduate school at Cornell University.

Later life and work

After serving his conviction term, Morris returned to Harvard to complete his Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) under the supervision of H. T. Kung. In 1995, Morris cofounded Viaweb with Paul Graham, a start-up company that made software for building online stores. It would go on to be sold to Yahoo for $49 million, which renamed the software Yahoo! Store. In 1999, Morris received his Ph.D. in Applied Sciences from Harvard for a thesis titled Scalable TCP Congestion Control. That same year, he was appointed as an assistant professor at MIT.

In 2005, Morris cofounded Y Combinator, a seed-stage startup venture capital funding firm that provides seed money, advice, and connections at two 3-month programs per year (with Paul Graham, Trevor Blackwell, and Jessica Livingston). In 2006, Morris was awarded tenure at MIT and became a technical advisor for Cisco Meraki. In 2008, released the programming language Arc, a Lisp dialect, alongside Paul Graham.

In 2010, Morris was awarded the 2010 Special Interest Group in Operating Systems (SIGOPS) Mark Weiser award. In 2015, Morris was elected a Fellow of Association for Computing Machinery (ACM, 2014) for "contributions to computer networking, distributed systems, and operating systems." In 2019, Morris was elected to the National Academy of Engineering.

Criminal prosecution

In 1989, Morris was indicted for violating United States Code Title 18 (18 U.S.C. § 1030), the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). He was the first person to be indicted under this act. In December 1990, he was sentenced to three years of probation, 400 hours of community service, and a fine of $10,050 plus the costs of his supervision. He appealed, but his conviction was affirmed the following March. Morris's stated motive during the trial was "to demonstrate the inadequacies of current security measures on computer networks by exploiting the security defects [he] had discovered." He completed his sentence as of 1994.