Actually, the hacker koans are as far as I can tell, all real. The one about the neural network can be found almost identical but with real-world detail in Levy's Hackers book, the one about turning on and off the Lisp machine will be familiar to anyone whose aid has been beseeched only for the problem to disappear when you arrive, and the toaster koan features a Drescher who I recently realized is the philosopher Gary Drescher and who was indeed at the Lab in the right years.