The worm used in the Xerox PARC experiments of the early 1980s wasn't
intentionally malicious, despite the above quote. It was intended as a framework
for distributed computation, to make use of otherwise unused CPU time. A
user would write a program to run in parallel, on many different machines -
this program would sit atop the worm mechanism, and the worm would manage
the mechanics of making the program run on different machines