On a very early computer system, which lacked any shared directory structure but also lacked any protection tools, a programmer invented a novel way of making the game available to several users. A version of the game existed in one user's directory. Whenever he played the game, the program made a copy of itself into another directory. It's rare enough to hear an urban legend about which you know any of the facts, but it's astonishing to be reading a major magazine and encounter such a story which you not only personally recall but which you're responsible for . From time to time I see versions of this apocryphal story.
Details vary from version to version.
As it happens, I know something about what really occurred, which is actually pretty interesting. I wrote the program, you see. In January of 1975 I was working in the data processing department of a large engineering company in the United States. This Univac operating system was for its time quite advanced and offered significantly greater security than, for example, Unix does today. The system provided shared directories as well as private, protected files.