Contributions should be relevant, sound, in good taste, objective, coherent, concise, nonrepetitious.
Diversity is welcome.
Certainly, margin calls and the human tendency toward fear and panic in that kind of a crisis contributed to an extremely unstable feedback loop. But let's see if we can identify precisely what roles the computers played, for better or for worse. The truncation of UNIX passwords to 8 characters is not a bug, it's a feature. The keys for DES are 56 bits long. 8 characters, at 7 bits per character, makes 56 bits.