The devouring fungus
by Karla Jennings · first published 1990
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3recommended by
4HN commenters
2014–2024first – last mentioned
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Neat! Interestingly, many of these stories made it into dead tree form in Karla Jennings' _The Devouring Fungus_, which provides a nice narrative around this folklore and investigates some of these more thoroughly. She also goes into computing history a bit (Babbage, Zeus, etc.) I was surprised to see it's still…
on “Computer-related horror stories, folklore and anecdotes (1990)” ↗I'm very disappointed that the very first entry in the list is a bogus story confirmed to be false. I mean, if you simply want general computing legends of unconfirmed veracity, read “The Devouring Fungus” by Karla Jennings.
on “Software Folklore – A collection of weird bug stories” ↗A collection of old hacker legends compiled for a book called "The Devouring Fungus" by Karla Jennings. There are some repetitive themes if you read long enough (eg computers being very sensitive to ESD or fluctuations in power), but there's a lot of great stories. You can search these…
on “Computer-related folklore, horror stories, and annecdotes” ↗From The Devouring Fungus, Karla Jennings, 1990, chapter 10, The Monster Turns… and Falls to its Knees, p. 211: Another legendary debacle triggered by light hit at a highly publicized affair thrown by IBM, ironic considering…
on “A Xenon flash will cause the Raspberry Pi 2 to freeze” ↗From The Devouring Fungus (Karla Jennings, 1990), chapter 6: — […] Imagine the frustration of the Stanford University instructor with an especially thick repairman who kept showing up to fix the same computer. He’d stay for…
on “Bifurcate the Problem Space” ↗There's a book called The Devouring Fungus: Tales of the Computer Age [1] that features a story like this, was that the book? Apparently there are tons of these stories [2] [3], many of them probably urban legends. But there was one last year…
on “How a software glitch at the UK Post Office ruined lives” ↗