Mike's Minutiae

"From a business and marketing perspective, it was the most exciting thing that I ever experienced in my life. I don't know what Woodstock was like, but I felt like it was this little secret sale that everybody knew about."

It is one of the least publicized achievements of the computer revolution: a huge, arching communications network connecting 60,000 computers by high-speed data links and ordinary telephone lines. Developed by the U.S. Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency in the late 1960s, Arpanet, as the information grid is called, has carried everything from unclassified military data to electronic love notes sent from one lonely researcher to another. But last week it became the conduit for something much more dramatic: one of the most sophisticated and infectious computer viruses the world has yet seen.

The trouble surfaced in computer centers at two institutions that serve as major network links: M.I.T. and the University of California, Berkeley. Last Wednesday night computers at both centers started furiously generating unwanted electronic files, clogging up their storage systems and slowing operations to a crawl. Almost immediately, similar problems began turning up at other centers throughout the network, from the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington to New Mexico's Los Alamos National Laboratory. Within hours, operators shut down thousands of machines across the country to quarantine them, severing their connections to other computers and rendering productive work all but impossible.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation began an official criminal investigation today of the computer ''virus'' that crippled a nationwide Pentagon data network last week, and officials indicated that a decision on whether to prosecute the author of the renegade computer program was near.

Charles Steinmetz, a spokesman for the bureau, said an informal inquiry into the computer incident over the weekend uncovered ''enough elements there for the Federals to investigate it officially'' as a probable criminal act.

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The man suspected of planting the virus in a Cornell University computer terminal, Robert Tappan Morris, a 23-year-old graduate student at Cornell University, appeared briefly with his father outside his parents' home in Arnold, Md., this afternoon, but declined to discuss the incident.