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"I do think there is a link in that in both cases, writing fiction or writing a computer program, at any given moment you're focusing on a very specific and particular thing—one word, one line of code, whatever."
- Neal Stephenson

Time Quake  
  Too much energy applied to a time-fault may have started this.  

I don’t know of an earlier use for this term.

"...The Soviets are systematically destroying continental America, mile by mile. Roms are cheap. They make them by the million and fire them off. The whole process is automatic...

"“The concentrated energy must have tipped some unstable time-fault. Like a sock fault. We're always starting earthquakes. But a time quake . . . Interesting. That’s what happened, I think. The release of energy, the destruction of matter, sucked your house into the future. Carried the house seven years ahead. This street, everything here, this very spot, was pulverized. Your house, seven years back, was caught in the undertow. The blast must have lashed back through time.”

“Sucked into the future,” Tim said. “During the night. While we were asleep.”

Technovelgy from Breakfast at Twilight, by Philip K. Dick.
Published by Amazing Stories in 1954
Additional resources -

John Varley used it to great effect in Millenium:

I believe I was told the rate of approach of this...one of the engineers called it a 'timequake'...is on the order of two hundred years per hour.

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Additional resources:
  More Ideas and Technology from Breakfast at Twilight
  More Ideas and Technology by Philip K. Dick
  Tech news articles related to Breakfast at Twilight
  Tech news articles related to works by Philip K. Dick

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