As to the first, the Traveller wiki has this Virus page:
http://traveller.wikia.com/wiki/Virus/TNE
For the Puppeteer virus, it looks like the progress was roughly
Strain 1 (Suicider) -> Strain 1A (Suicide Inducer) -> Strain 2A (Destroyer) -> Strain 2B (Reproducer) -> Empire Builder (many platforms, one mind) -> Alliance Builder (works with other Virus) -> Puppeteer (infects other Virus with their own code)
Oh, for specialist strains, I'm scared to imagine what a Virus that grew up in a massive government bureaucracy mainframe would be like. The DMV from Hell would probably be R&R compared to what it does.
Todd Kes
--- On Fri, 6/15/12, wrote:
> Peacekeepers, I can't say right off. I think I published my
> "family tree
> of Virus" somewhere. Where did Peacekeepers evolve from?
> A couple things to consider about Virus evolution is a)
> Virus was released
> in Lucan's space, so the populations there are the oldest,
> so new strains
> have had the most time to develop there. However, was that
> the most
> hospitable place for that strain to survive? So maybe it had
> to evolve
> elsewhere so it could live, and b) mutations were influenced
> by the type
> of data processing hardware it evolved on, so wherever that
> stuff might
> have been more common, was a good place for it to evolve.
> But I can't say what that would have been.