Which I believed.
I've never heard it blamed on corrupted computer chips, and I don't really see how you could mangle hardware to create a particular effect in whatever software was running on it.
It'd be easy enough to build hardware that would stop working, but to keep working but to make many pieces of software fail in specified ways seems like a very difficult task.
I rather doubt the ways they failed were specified. Unspecified, unplanned, unexpected failures of an unknown nature would be what I would shoot for. Say, for instance, a trojan that would randomly select code that does arithmetic computations to make a powers-of-ten mistake, here and there, randomly.
It'd be easy enough to build hardware that would stop working, but to keep working but to make many pieces of software fail in specified ways seems like a very difficult task.
Coming from someone with degrees in both Electrical Engineering & Computer Science, I totally agree with you. The "infected computer chip" story sounds like a load of crap some creative writer came up with based on pop-science TV shows.
The real-world financial burden that Reagan applied to the Soviets by escalating the arms race is more than enough justification for their accelerated collapse. The author didn't need to come up with goofy, albeit entertaining, science fiction to further explain what happened.