Tags rock!

Re: Snow Crash - this maybe?

Stephenson explained the title of the novel in his 1999 essay In the Beginning...was the Command Line as his term for a particular software failure mode on the early Apple Macintosh computer. About the Macintosh, Stephenson wrote that "when the computer crashed and wrote gibberish into the bitmap, the result was something that looked vaguely like static on a broken television set — a 'snow crash'". A similar behavior can be observed on computers with graphic cards after a GPU crash.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snow_Crash