This post originates from a mere coincidence, namely a) @EdS’s recent post on the SCAMP and the IBM 5100 and b) a Rolling Stone Story featured on HN today.
Ad a) Closely connected to the 5100 is the most hilarious piece of computer folklore, namely the story of John Titor, a self proclaimed time travel agent, who appeared on some bulletin boards in 2000/2001. The IBM 5100 here plays the role of an elaborate MacGuffin, as the Titor posts exposed some of the then lesser known features of the machine, namely its PALM processor simulating other IBM CPUs in microcode in order to repurpose existing implementations of APL and BASIC. In the Titor story, the IBM 5100 features as some kind of universal computer to computer translator, mankind’s only hope of bringing up civilisation from the aftermath of the overflow of the 32-bit Unix timestamp.
I barely managed to withstand the urge to add this as a footnote to EdS’s post , when I stumbled upon
b) The Rolling Stone story “How UFO culture took over America” by Stephen Rodrick featured on HN (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24451502).
Here it struck me: Is it true that there are no stories linking a computer to UFOs, as has been done with probably any technological artefact on the planet? Did I miss any? (Well, there are stories of UFOs allegedly playing with computerized Radar systems and launch codes on ICBM sites, but these are rather about the entire electronic system of a site and not so much about a particular computer.)
Also, are there any haunted computers?
What are known computer related X-Files stories?
(Are computer actually that uninspiring that there should be none at all? – I mean, the industrial revolution had ghost trains, so where are the haunting DOS prompts appearing from the midst of nowhere on a foggy Park Avenue?)
P.S.: There’s the story of a haunted Ms Pac-Man cabinet, which was once auctioned with this attribute on eBay, but I’m not sure, if this does count as a computer. Moreover, this seems to have been linked more to the cabinet than to the electronics inside.