Alan Mark Davis is president and CEO of Offtoa, Inc. in Westminster, Colorado.
At UIUC, Davis was notable for creating an early malware program.
It was a process on a PDP-11 that (a) checked to see if an identical copy of itself was currently running as an active process, and if not, created a copy of itself and started it running; (b) checked to see if any disk space (which all users shared) was available, and if so, created a file the size of that space; and (c) looped back to step (a).
He held industry positions at GTE (a Director of R&D at GTE Communication Systems in Phoenix, Arizona; and Director of the Software Technology Center at GTE Laboratories in Waltham, Massachusetts), BTG (Vice President in Vienna, Virginia), and Omni-Vista (President in Colorado Springs, Colorado).
In 2006, his 201 Principles of Software Development was voted by ACM members as one of the 20 classic computer science books: