TELECOM Digest Editor noted in response to T. Sean Weintz:
[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Ooops, I was thinking of humanoid
> type Zombies. In a movie on television the other night, "Village of
> the Undead", after some damn fool went and dug up a grave at the
> local cemetery, the Zombie thus resurrected went around the town
> creating more of his kind. He would touch and kill one person; that
> person became a Zombie. Then the two Zombies created more of their
> kind the same way, finding new people, killing them, and bringing
> them back to life as new Zombies. After about an hour of this (one
> Zombie creates another Zombie, etc) eventually the few remaining
> actual living people in this village thought it prudent to call in
> the police, or some kind of militia to do in the bunch of them,
> which is how the movie ended. It was sort of like two old movies I
> saw, 'The Zombies of Mora Tau' and 'Abbott and Costello Meet the
> Zombie'. With humanoid zombies, first someone has to dig one up,
> then that one goes around reproducing his own kind from other
> people. I guess computers don't have to do it that way. PAT]
Yeah. Movie zombies do work that way. I'm afraid I don't know any of those movies. But 'Night of the Living Dead' illustrates the same concept.
However not all humanoid zombies work that way -- traditional African and Haitian voodoo folklore zombies (a tradition predating the existence of movies) are created one at a time by voodoo priest or "Bokor". These zombies are the supposedly used as slaves by the bokor. They can't themselves make others into zombies -- in fact they are completely under the control of the bokor, and do his/her bidding only.
That is the type of zombie I think whomever coined the phrase for computer use had in mind.
[TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Well, in this movie on television, a professor was giving a lecture on the Voodoo religion, and someone raised the point of how there in that town, a person who had been thought to be a Witch or a Zombie or something like that had been sacrificed and put to death by the town authorities a couple hundred years earlier. Nothing would do but this professor had to go dig up the corpse and examine it to look for signs of Witchcraft or Voodoo-ism or whatever. Well ... unearthing that corpse and its casket is what got all the trouble started. It turned out to be a Zombie, who was quite angry at having been made to wait two hundred years to get dug up so he could get back to his business. Although many townfolk were victimized (turned into Zombies themselves and left for 'undead' to continue the rampage as more and more of them got created) in the course of the movie, of course the Professor and his female research assistant got away unscathed, as you would expect. PAT]