80s' viruses as inspiration for DTNs

Viruses which were transmitted on floppy disks were probably the first application of "delay tolerant" networks. There was no contemporaneous connectivity between two nodes. And viruses opportunistically piggybacked themselves onto other files. Sometimes a virus copy would get lucky and reach a hub in the floppy social network, and then could reach a HUGE number of other computers very quickly. The only difference between DTN packets and virises is that viruses usually don't have a targeted destination.