# Hacks and true stories of computing

## See also

- ["Hacker Folklore"](http://catb.org/jargon/html/appendixa.html) in the Jargon File
- [LISA '96 sysadmin horror story contest](https://web.archive.org/web/20001121091300/http://www.usenix.org/sage/lisa/lisa96/just_for_fun/horrors.html)---"LISA" stands for ["Large Installation System Administration Conference"](https://web.archive.org/web/20201111195834/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Large_Installation_System_Administration_Conference)
- "LPD for fun and MP3 playing" in [Unix command queues](/command-queues)
- [Long-running servers](/long-running)
- ["Software Folklore"](http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/lore/)---a collection of stories mostly about bugs
- ["The Cursed Computer Iceberg Meme"](https://suricrasia.online/iceberg/)
- ["The Unofficial Unix Administration Horror Story Summary, version 1.1"](https://www.zeugmaweb.net/misc/unix/admin-horror.html), Anatoly Ivasyuk (1993)

## Links

- [Apple's MPW C compiler errors](https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~jasonh/personal/humor/compile.html)
- [Beating Arkanoid faster than ever by brute force and simulation](http://tasvideos.org/6347S.html)
  (via ["Computer Optimization: Your Computer Is Faster Than You Think"](https://www.gwern.net/notes/faster), Gwern Branwen)
- [How Coherent 4.2.05 corrupted filesystems](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21210583)
- ["MP3 for image compression"](http://keyj.emphy.de/mp3-for-image-compression/)
- ["Print this file, your printer will jam"](https://nedbatchelder.com/blog/200811/print_this_file_your_printer_will_jam.html)
- ["Russian malware communicates by leaving comments in Britney Spears's Instagram"](https://boingboing.net/2017/06/07/watering-holes.html)
- ["The Ultimate in Garbage Collection"](/ultimate-gc)
- ["Unix Recovery Legend"](https://www.ee.ryerson.ca/~elf/hack/recovery.html)
- ["WebP: The WebPage compression format"](https://purplesyringa.moe/blog/webp-the-webpage-compression-format/)

## Page metadata

URL: <https://dbohdan.com/hack-stories.md>

Published 2020-09-29, updated 2025-08-12.

Tags:

- bookmarks
- compression
- history
- humor
- nonfiction
- programming
- sysadmin