Its creator, Robert Tappin Morris, is now a tenured professor at MIT.

The worm caused an estimated $100,000 to $10,000,000 in damage.

It wasn’t intended to be destructive but, in order to avoid being defeated by false positives created by network administrators, it included a 14% replication rate regardless of whether the worm was present and active on the computer. This caused it to occasionally replicate rapidly and crash certain machines and spread further and faster than expected.

Happy birthday Morris worm

It might be important to note that the internet at the time was not opened to the public when this was done. It doesn’t mention that in the wikipedia article and I think is an important distinction to make.