We do not know the origin of many words. Luckily, since computer science is a science that is just over 60 years old, it is easy to track its terms. The word “spyware” was invented by programmer Roland Vossen on October 16, 1995.. So he just turned 30 years old.
Curiously, it was born as part of a humorous critique of Windows 95the first to start tracking and monitoring what users do.
Today Windows 11 is controversial due to its constant tracking and monitoring. But it is not a modern problem. 30 years ago users had the same concernsdespite the fact that spyware in the 90s was child’s play, a drop of water in the ocean that it is now.
This is the post that Roland Vossen wrote in a programming group on Usenet, one of the social networks of the time, 30 years ago:
The first use of the word Spyware
According to computer historian David L. Farquhar on his blog, Roland Vossen joked about a Windows 95 hack that revealed Microsoft’s marketing strategy. He attached an alleged code fragment where the file names were as descriptive as “lies.h” or “nonsense.h”, and there are functions called “false promises”.
In one of these lines of code, write: «#include spyware.h> /* Microsoft Network Connectivity library */”. Refers to the inclusion of tracking software in the Microsoft network. He had just invented the word spyware.
It was an immediate success, because grammatically it is perfect: it is short, direct, and the meaning is in the name. Thirty years later it is still in common use to designate spyware.
Spyware in software became popular when the Internet came into homes. Before, PCs were not connected, so cybercriminals or companies could not take what they spied on. But with the Internet it was now possible to track everything a user does, and recover it remotely, without them knowing.
In the nineties, spyware was distributed in DLL libraries that installed free applications, or the operating system itself. But they failed a lot, or accumulated, so computer crashes and the Blue Screen of Death were frequent.
Now operating system spyware is invisible and does not slow down your computer. But it is more present than ever. On Windows 11, but also on Android, iOS or MacOS. Only Linux is saved.