Every little detail in this paragraph from The New Yorker is fascinating:
"In 1989, twenty thousand public-health researchers around the world received a floppy disk purporting to contain an informational program about AIDS. But the disk also included a malicious pro-ord gram that is now considered the first instance of ransomware. After users rebooted their computers ninety times, a text box appeared on the screen, informing them that their files were locked. Then their printers spat out a ransom note instructing them to mail a hundred and eighty-nine dollars to a post-office box in Panama. The malware, which came to be known as the AIDS Trojan, was created by Joseph Popp, a Harvard-trained evolutionary biologist. Popp, whose behavior grew increasingly erratic after his arrest, was declared unfit to stand trial; he later founded a butterfly sanctuary in upstate New York."