People first started writing malware in the 1970s and early 1980s. Computers were very simple then. They did not have any interesting information for malware to take. Instead, people wrote malware for fun or just to show that they could. Even the most common piece of malware from this time did not do damage to people's computers. In fact, malware was so rare that the word "malware" was not coined until 1990. 