Nearly twenty years ago I had a little server farm of old PCs. Two or three Pentium-133s, one dual Pentium Pro 200 machine, and my pride and joy, a Pentium 3 running at 600 MHz. I was trying to get familiar with Gentoo and to make recompiling everything all the time more bearable I set up distcc so my P3 could do most of the work. It worked very well!
But after a few weeks every Gentoo box in the house started crashing regularly. It took me a while to figure out what was going on: one of the slower machines had developed a single-bit memory error and was sharing corrupted .so files with all other machines.
This is Moid Moidelhoff's fascinating two hour interview with science fiction author and marine biologist Peter Watts, covering consciousness, intelligence, SF books and authors that influenced him, and many other subjects.
One of my cats loved snoozing on my big 19" CRT as well. When I replaced the CRT with my first LCD monitor, he tried to hop onto the non-existent top of the screen. In a mad scramble to not fall he put all of his front claws in the plastic cover of the screen. The LCD went from zero to hundreds of bad pixels within a day :-(
I bought the PDF last year for $7 (a very steep discount) during Apress/Springer's Black Friday sale. If you don't need the book right now or are on a budget, it may be worth waiting until next week in case they repeat the offer.
I installed Debian Jessie on my 320CDT just a week or two ago. That's the last version of Debian that supports the Pentium MMX CPU. The battery doesn't hold a charge anymore and the screen is pretty dim.
The 320CDT came with Windows 95 but I got a $200 or so Toshiba store credit in a class action settlement because of a floppy drive problem with the 320CDT that I never actually experienced. I used that to buy Windows 2000 which ran reasonably well on the 96MB of RAM I have in the 320CDT.
My next laptop was a Satellite Pro 6100 which was a truly awful piece of hardware... got sent in for repairs multiple times and never worked right.
The ACLU has been affected as well. From the email they sent out yesterday:
In all candor, we are frustrated with the lack of information we've received from Blackbaud about this incident thus far. The ACLU is doing everything in our power to ascertain the full nature of the breach, and we are actively investigating the nature of the data that was involved, details of the incident, and Blackbaud's remediation plans.
We are also exploring all options to ensure this does not happen again, including revisiting our relationship with Blackbaud.
This probably doesn't qualify as a modern version, but I occasionally play Civ2 (the original Win32s version, in a 32-bit Windows 7 VM) and the empire splitting happens there as well.
It took CNN years to get the aspect ratio of their videos right -- all of their web video used to look like standard def TV stretched out to a HD screen. So the answer is almost certainly no.
Another Alastair Reynolds short story in the same vein is "A Murmuration" that I read (on my Kindle) in Interzone #257. In the story a flock of birds exhibits intelligence independently from the individual birds.