To this day, Morris doesn’t really talk about it—though in a lot of ways, his worm had positive side effects, by exposing just how poor security was on many university networks. People didn’t care about password security until Robert Morris came along. Now, security is treated as an immensely important part of running a large network. And Morris, who currently serves as an assistant professor in MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, has become a person worthy of emulating—something that can’t be said about John McAfee these days.

“He has not tried to make any money or work in this area,” Purdue University computer science professor Eugene Spafford said of Morris in an interview with The Washington Post. “His behavior has been consistent in supporting his defense: that it was an accident and he felt badly about it. I think it’s very much to his credit that that has been his behavior ever since.”