Episode 143 - The Haunted Hard Drive

Advent of Computing

Have you ever felt like a computer just refuses to work? Like a machine has a mind of it's own? In 1970 a hard drive at the National Farmers Union Corp. office decided to do just that. That year it started crashing for apparently no reason. It would take 2 years and 56 crashes to sort out the problem. The ultimate solution would leave more questions than answers. Was the hard drive haunted? Or was something else at play?

Selected Sources:

https://archive.org/details/computercrime0000mckn/page/98/mode/2up - Computer Crime

https://archive.org/details/sim_computerworld_1972-08-02_6_31/mode/1up?view=theater - Computer World article