Hogfather

56

Possibly Hex has caught a virus. On the Discworld, there’s no obvious reason why a virus shouldn’t be transmittable from human to computer or vice-versa.

In the early 1970s there appeared a sort of proto-virus called the ‘Cookie Monster’, which cropped up on a number of computers — notably Multics-based machines. What would happen is that unsuspecting users would suddenly find messages demanding cookies on their terminals, and they would not be able to proceed until they typed ‘COOKIE’ or ‘HAVECOOKIE’, etc. — in much the same way as Hex is ‘cured’ by typing ‘DRYDFRORGPILLS’.

For more details see: http://www.multicians.org/cookie.html