Microsoft engineer speedruns Raspberry Pi magic smoke in five minutes

Microsoft is no stranger to things breaking unexpectedly – and now one of its engineers has added a Raspberry Pi to the list. Steve Syfuhs, a Principal Engineering Manager at the Windows behemoth, managed to release the magic smoke from a Raspberry Pi 5 in five minutes, he says. Outside his day job dealing with authentication …

[Doctor Syntax]

Tips hat to speedy reminder.

[Gene Cash]

He posted this?

First off, the connector doesn't need keying. You align the hat board over the main board.

Second, it should be obvious you don't connect powered equipment unless it's specifically denoted as hotplug. The Pi is definitely not, and there are warnings to not do that.

Third, he did something this hamfisted and posted to the known universe about it? I'd look around with a guilty look and pray nobody saw me.

[Empire of the Pussycat]

Re: He posted this?

At Microsoft, they have no shame about breaking things.

[Sweet_FA]

Re: He posted this?

Back when they had testers, this was less of a liability.

[JimmyPage]

Re: He posted this?

Downvoted, because knowledge is never a waste of time.

--> for the time and trouble.

[KittenHuffer]

Re: He posted this?

Experience is what you get when you don't get what you want!

[herman]

Re: He posted this?

Wisdom comes from experience and experience comes from a lack of wisdom.

[BartyFartsLast]

Re: He posted this?

There's no reason you can't have a powered HAT if it needs more power than the Pi can supply, it's absolutely fine and there are several UPS HATs that use the GPIO connector.

What's generally not OK is stuffing 5V into the wrong pins or reverse polarity.

[that one in the corner]

Re: He posted this?

> There's no reason you can't have a powered HAT if it needs more power than the Pi can supply

True, a HAT can supply power to the Pi, even some Official Raspberry Pi branded HATs do that. You can even have a HAT with its own power that *doesn't* try to power the R'Pi as well, nor pull power *from* the R'Pi either, if you feel like it (e.g. the HAT runs on 12V and uses optoisolators to talk to the R'Pi's GPIO).

The problem is that the line

>> Worse, the HAT was powered, sending electricity where it didn't belong

is a bit vague and, to my eyes (and those you are respondng to?) on first reading this meant "Worse, the HAT was powered up when it was plugged into the R'Pi, (when the instructions are quite clear that you should remove all power from the R'Pi and HAT before trying to plug them together)".

In fact, from the article and from the post the articles links to I am none the wiser which situation actually occured... just that the wrong volts went to the wrong place at the wrong time leading to general wrongness on board.

[BartyFartsLast]

Re: He posted this?

The article quite explicitly says he fitted the HAT backwards.

Which would put 5V or other voltages where it shouldn't be.

[that one in the corner]

Re: He posted this?

> The article quite explicitly says he fitted the HAT backwards

GOSH so it does! I NEVER noticed! What WOULD I do without your help?

Not that you have bothered to respond to the point of the post you have replied to, which was about the ambiguity of when it was powered and from which direction.

Admittedly, we were just nattering about a small side issue and dragging it too far into the light for anyone's comfort, given that we had actually RTFA'ed and seen the admission. Oh, and even admitted to have read the Bluesky post as well.

[BartyFartsLast]

Re: He posted this?

I mean, honestly, I'm not sure how you manage if you don't realise that the Pi will almost definitely survive having a HAT that is powered up plugged into it as long as it's oriented correctly

What it will not, and as the article very clearly states, did not survive, is a HAT plugged in backwards because that puts the positive voltage rails from the HAT onto Ground and GPIO pins, essentially reverse polarity through the Broadcom chip and voltage regulator(s)

Happy to help, again.

Next time I'll need a purchase order number and billing address for the invoice.

[that one in the corner]

Re: He posted this?

> I'm not sure how you manage if you don't realise that the Pi will almost definitely survive having a HAT that is powered up plugged into it as long as it's oriented correctly

"Almost definitely" - love the almost - glad not to be relying on your hardware skills.

Let us not be concerned about putting the HAT in at an angle so that pins closer to one end contact before the others, or minor (otherwise trivial) differences in pin length (especially if they were hand-soldered, more chance of the pins sliding in the plastic strip). Getting GND connected first - and even then you find that the two boards are floating just a bit too far...

I am sure that you, the most experienced R'Pi user in the world, who has only ever produced absolutely perfectly fitted boards, have *almost* definitely never blown any as you habitually plug them all in whilst powered from various sources.

But for Joe Bloggs, I'll stick to telling them to power down first. As will I, hopefully, remember to with the R'Pi and every other board.

> What it will not, and as the article very clearly states, did not survive, is a HAT plugged in backwards...

And one day, maybe you will be lucky enough to find someday who actually expressed a belief that it *could* survive that and then you will be able to be all smug at them.

> Next time I'll need a purchase order number and billing address for the invoice

That'd be a novelty for you, eh.

[Number6]

Re: He posted this?

That's the usual thing. Quickly disconnect all the power, surreptitiously try to dissipate any visible smoke with gentle and quiet blowing and appear innocent when someone else in the room smells burning and looks around for the source. Or celebrate the achievement if it's clearly obvious. Own it and say "Impressive!" loudly. I do remember as a junior engineer producing a light-emitting op-amp when a test probe I was holding slipped and shorted something. Lasted a good ten seconds, with with everyone else panicking and me just sitting there admiring the sight because I knew it was already too late.

I'm sure people who do electronics are capable of detecting the magic smoke at concentrations well below that of the general population.

[Steve Davies 3]

Re: He posted this?

You can't call yourself an Electronics Engineer until you have wired up something with the +5V connected to the -5V terminal and vice versa.

IF you do it regularly then you are in the wrong career and more than likely colour blind.

[OwenMc64]

Re: He posted this?

Indeed….

For my first job I got a medical test (first and last time…..), at which my colour blind issues were gently queried with a ‘you’re not going to be working with electricity, are you?’ Fair question, as the company had a large consumer electronics component, far removed from my role :-)

[David Hicklin]

Re: He posted this?

240 AC on a board of TTL chips when using an uninsulated screwdriver as a probe and touching a triac heat sink.

Watched as little white blobs whizzed along the PCB tracks and as they passed each chip promptly blowing the top off the chip package.

Amazingly after bridging a couple of vaporised track sections and a new set of chips it still worked afterwards. I guess the chips sacrificed themselves to save the resistors and capacitors.

It was a long time ago and I was still a teenager (retired now to give sense of time) but a lesson well learned.

[doublelayer]

Re: He posted this?

I don't think he did connect that as a hotplug. He connected it backward, and the pins that accept lots of power are not the same when you do that, meaning the not hotplugged installation will still deliver power to the wrong place when it gets plugged in.

I don't know why he did it backward, but it's possible that whatever he was connecting wasn't one of those hats that's conveniently the same size and shape as the rest of the board so it's obvious. If you connect using a ribbon cable or to something which passes the GPIO through, then you have to be careful with the orientation.

[Androgynous Cupboard]

Re: He posted this?

> the connector doesn't need keying. You align the hat board over the main board.

Jesus wept, have 1000 upvotes - off by a pin maybe, but backwards is close to impossible. Presumably the next day he got dressed in the morning but accidentally put his trousers on his head.

[that one in the corner]

Re: He posted this?

Try a cheap version of one of these extenders! All too easy to plug it in any way you like, back to front, upside down... especially if you have stackable headers involved somewhere.

Nice ones, like this Pimoroni job, give you loads of hints (pin labels, a nice dotted outline) but the first extenders I had were - far less friendly. And a right pain (cue sticky labels and Sharpie on the ribbon cable before even considering plugging them in, I am all too aware of what I'm likely to do...).

[lordminty]

Re: He posted this?

I've got a small screen hat that I have located a short distance from the Pi its connected to, via short, individual Dupont cables, as it only needs a small number of pins connected.

In my example it would be very easy to connect the hat backwards!

[herman]

Re: He posted this?

Pin 1 should always have a square pad if the other pads are rounded.

[TekGuruNull]

Re: He posted this?

It may not have mattered whether the HAT was connected correctly. If the Pi sensed an impending install of some homebrew version of Windows, it naturally would have destroyed itself rather than suffer a fate worse than death.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: He posted this?

My Pi 5 runs Windows 11 ARM64 in a VM just fine and with still plenty of resources left to run a domain controller in Samba. It's the 16GB model.

[Al fazed]

Confirmed

That this is the type of person who has been designing Windws OSes since I imagine at least Windows 95.

Maybe it's the special quality embodied in the phrase "what's this for" supported by the dev having no idea what it says in the f*cking manual........

No wonder Windows OSes always seem to have been built using a similar methodology.

ALF

[Thereneverwasaplot]

Re: Confirmed

That's if he read the manual in the first place. I suspect it's a classic rtfm

[GlenP]

Keying...

Keying connectors doesn't always work.

My former boss managed to force a DIMM into the keyed slot the wrong way round. The magic smoke was quickly forthcoming as soon as he turned the computer back on, fortunately it was only the memory that died.

His comment, "I thought it was a bit tight!"

[BartyFartsLast]

Re: Keying...

Oh I've seen DIMMs with the keying filed wider to fit incorrect sockets, needless to say neither the DIMM or motherboard were happy.

[Chloe Cresswell]

Re: Keying...

One went to a machine and found the 25 pin serial lead in the wrong way around.

We suspected they used a hammer.

[Fred Dibnah]

Re: Keying...

The old Cisco 60-pin serial port connector was pretty awful. The pins were in a rectangle and the D-type shell was not a pronounced D shape and made of thin tin, so it was easy to plug it in upside down. The one time I saw it done (not by me, honest guv) on a powered 2600 router, it didn’t damage the port but it made the shell into an oval shape so it was now impossible to know which way up it should go.

[that one in the corner]

Re: Keying...

Or external to the case, the DIN RGB video cable rammed onto the BNC the at the back of the venerable BBC Micro. Luckily, that one was a smoke-free event and repairable with needle-nosed pliers*

* only used on the DIN plug as the miscreant had legged it

[Bebu sa Ware]

Re: Keying...

it was only the memory that died.

Patently not. Clearly still vivid. Only the hardware has gone to God. ;)

It is an peculiar observation the even quite competent chaps in the hardware line, once that have been promoted from the ranks into the heady atmosphere of bossdom rapidly become as hamfistee and reckless as a demolition slavey.

Some I wouldn't trust to plug in a a three pin (AS/NZS 3112) power lead without their getting it the wrong way round.

[Pickle Rick]

Re: Keying...

> Only the hardware has gone to God.

With all the calculators and toasters? You're obviously a frying pantheist!

[The Oncoming Scorn]

Re: Keying...

So you're a waffle man.....

[Locomotion69]

It was AI that did it.

This particular RPi noticed itself being too close to MS so it decided by some AI algorithm that the only way to escape was to selfdestruct.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: It was AI that did it.

"but was prevented from doing so when his major intestine leapt up his neck and throttled his brain in a desperate bid to save life and civilisation"

[elsergiovolador]

The Raspberry Pi didn’t “lack protection”. It committed the unforgivable sin of assuming the user understood orientation, pin-outs, and the idea that electricity is not a vibe but a thing that goes places.

Somewhere along the way we replaced basic electronic literacy with abstractions, guardrails, and the comforting lie that hardware should be as forgiving as software. So when a board presents 40 bare pins and asks for a shred of spatial reasoning, the result is panic, smoke, and a Bluesky thread.

It’s an education gap meeting live power. The Pi behaved like electronics always have. The surprise seems to be that anyone expected otherwise.

The real issue isn’t that the pins aren’t keyed. It’s that we now treat knowing which way round something goes as an optional skill, right up until the smell of burning epoxy reintroduces it.

What makes it truly funny is not the mistake, but the expectation that the world should apologise for it. A £50 board in a cardigan is apparently supposed to compensate for the slow erosion of first principles. When it doesn’t, we don’t question the gap in understanding. We write a post about safety.

[martinusher]

There's definitely an element of "RTFM" here. Parts and pins have been marked from the beginning of time, be it a notch, dot or full silkscreen. That doesn't always guarantee results -- I, for example, am a "measure twice, cut once and still get the damn thing wrong" sort of a person so I tend to obsessively check and recheck before powering things on.

The Pi boards I've worked with seem to have above average pin protection, its almost as if the parts were designed with lightweight screwups in mind.

[hammarbtyp]

Slow news day

Man breaks computer .. details at 11

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Slow news day

Man breaks computer without installing windows.

[ThatOne]

O tempora o mores

> managed to release the magic smoke from a Raspberry Pi 5 in five minutes, he says

Is this a contest? I'm pretty sure i can make it go up in flames in less by plugging it into the mains. Do I become famous too if I do?

Jeez.

[Androgynous Cupboard]

Re: O tempora o mores

When I were a teenager a mate bought a sound card he wanted to return to a shop with a “no returns” policy. His Dad plugged an in terminated mains cable into the wall and liberally ran 240V AC over the whole board, then they took it back with “it doesn’t work”

The man in the shop naturally decided to verify this, put the board in a computer and turned it on. Smoke and sparks were emitted, copiously. And he got his refund :-)

[frankvw]

Re: O tempora o mores

Kids these days... Sheesh!

Back in the early 1990s I inserted a 80387SX math coprocessor (quite pricey at the time) into its socket the wrong way. You may remember that the 387SX used a PLCC socket. While the chip itself was keyed (it had a tiny 45 degree angle at one corner) the either socket wasn't (on cheap Taiwanese boards) or the key was insufficient to mechanically prevent incorrect orientation. In other words, in practice correct placement relied on visual indicators (telling you which corner went where, just like with DIL/DIP sockets) and you could easily get it wrong if you were sloppy, in a hurry, or just to stupid or cocky to look what you were doing. (Let's be kind and assume I was too much in a hurry.)

Anyway, when I powered up the board the magic smoke escaped in less than a second.

Did I go online to announce this to the world? Did I get coverage in a leading IT mag? Heck, no! I simply did what we all did back then, which was to swap the damaged chip and board out with other ones we had in store, where it was discovered later that they didn't work and were returned as DOA under warranty, and I went on with my life.

These young whipper-snappers could learn a thing or two from us old graybeard. Now get off my lawn!

[David Hicklin]

Re: O tempora o mores

> were returned as DOA under warranty, and I went on with my life.

So you were a classic Who? Me? candidate. But yeah, that is how it was done if you could get away with it !

[Chloe Cresswell]

Re: O tempora o mores

My classic was an eprom cartridge for the BBC Master (or electron, the slots are electrically identical).

I put a rom in backwards, and was greeted by it instantly becoming a light emitting rom.

[Jason Bloomberg]

Re: O tempora o mores

It's pretty easy to release the magic smoke, deliberately or accidentally, instantly and explosively or with a pleasing build up of intensity. Flames are rarer but can be achieved.

The surprise here is generating magic smoke from a Raspberry Pi though not unexpected under the circumstances.

Most Pi users get no compensatory joy of seeing magic smoke, merely find the power management chip has quietly given up the ghost, that the official repair is to buy a new board.

As a Pi 5 can now cost over $200 that's costly for magic smoke, and without.

[frankvw]

Re: O tempora o mores

"It's pretty easy to release the magic smoke, deliberately or accidentally, instantly and explosively or with a pleasing build up of intensity. Flames are rarer but can be achieved."

Oh, yes. When I built my first PC XT clone from second hand components in the 1980s, I connected the power supply to the main board, switched it on, and immediately there was a loud bang, a flash, a small flame and a big puff of expensive-smelling blue smoke. I was convinced I'd fried the board and broken the bank.

Fortunately it turned out that this board came from a Taiwanese manufacturer who had used Tantalum electrolytic capacitors for decoupling capacitors (this was in the days of 74xx series TTL chips) which one should of course never do, because their proclivity to go bang due to inrush currents they cannot handle. The board turned out to be fine, so I changed my underwear, replaced all the Tantalum caps with ceramic 100nF ones and went on with the build. The board has never failed.

[Kenny Millar]

He forgot to enter the 'nosmoke' command.

If you know, you know.

[Throatwarbler Mangrove]

General Protection Fault: IS_COMPUTER_ON_FIRE=0x000000

[Anonymous Coward]

Re:General Protection Fault: IS_COMPUTER_ON_FIRE=0x000000

Never had that, but did get "lp0 is on fire" a few times, back in the old days. :-)

[IanRS]

Just a single instruction needed: HCF

[Ken Shabby]

HEK Halt and electrify keyboard

[Bebu sa Ware]

He forgot to enter the 'nosmoke' command.

Nah.

It goes into /boot/firmware/config.txt

# MODE_SMOKE 0=None, 1=Magic smoke, 2=Invisible smoke, 3=Trying to give it up

MODE_SMOKE=0

I always wondered why it was "magic smoke" when clearly the magic vanished once it had escape the device as the smoke's only "magic" was its unpleasant stench invariably lacking the tang of tin that characterises magic. If there were any "magic" in the smoke you ought to be able to capture the smoke and restore function to a magic·bereft defunct device by forcing the smoke into it. No one has ever managed to do this.

How does the magic get into the device in the first instance ? I hear you ask.

Presumably it is unavoidably, incrementally and invisibly incorporated during the mechanical process of construction with the "magic" being drawn from a universal magicarium field to which it will ultimately return; often with a flourish of smoke.

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: He forgot to enter the 'nosmoke' command.

You should set

MODE_SMOKE=-1

Then it replaces the magic smoke in any broken kit it's connected to

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: He forgot to enter the 'nosmoke' command.

I always wondered why it was "magic smoke"

Because it smells like DMT?

[IGotOut]

The best bit of this?

That an MS employee posted it on Bluesky rather than it's own dog food LinkedIn. Then again, he doesn't sound like the type to describe themself as a Thought Leader or AI Guru.

[conwaytwt]

I have no idea what HAT was involved, but the article alluded to soldering, so instead of just putting the HAT on backwards, maybe the socket got soldered to the wrong side of the board, with the same inverted and smoky result.

[lordminty]

I had to go and look

It was indeed an externally powered HAT, powered by a 4 amp PSU!

And he blew a hole in the RP1 chip. Ouch.

I'm sure if he stuck it on eBay some enterprising individual would buy it and replace the chip, or use it for spares.

[bill 27]

Ah yes...

That odd "keening" noise the electronics make just before the magic smoke escapes. Nope, not familiar with it, never happened to me, honest!

I will say it's a lot quieter than listening to the head that broke off inside the spinning disk.

[sedregj]

In the old days, we said welcome aboard

Steve S is a seriously clever bloke. I only know this because I have an AD domain with a kerberos over https KDC lying around doing its thing after finding a blog post he made. I think he is a mostly software geezer but he is a proper nerd and obviously he insisted on diving in on the hardware side by putting his tongue across 5.5V PD. I'm sure we have all done that at some time.

I doubt that anyone here has not looked at a 9V cell - the ones with both terminals on top, and thought ... hmm I wonder what happens when I touch my tongue to those metal things.

[Bebu sa Ware]

I touch my tongue to those metal things.

The effect is electric if not magic. Actually the terminals of a 9V battery lightly held against the lips normally produces a mild tingle.

Back in the day I recall hearing a suggestion that if you didn't have a neon mains tester with you just lick a used match and hold one end and touch the other end against the suspected live (240VAC) chassis - you should only get a light tingle. Me? I was never game to test that theory having already had a number of "bites."

Beside by that time I had given up the cancer sticks and didn't normally have matches about my person. (This was before the curse of disposible lighters.)

[frankvw]

Re: I touch my tongue to those metal things.

"The effect is electric if not magic."

I can attest to that. As a student I built a tube pre-amplifier, during which I decided to test it by injecting some hum into the input by putting my finger on the grid lead, while holding an earphone to my ear. Unfortunately the pin I touched was not the grid but the anode. With 350V DC on it. From a very chunky electrolytic capacitor. Which went through my anatomy from my right hand forefinger all the way to my left hand held against my ear.

Do you know what it feels like to be hit by a diesel locomotive at full speed? I do.

[PRR]

Re: In the old days, we said welcome aboard

> 9V cell - .... I wonder what happens when I touch my tongue to those metal things.

In vacuum tube/valve days they made slightly larger battry but 45 Volts. I wondered what you wondered. My dad suggested my tongue would roll-up like a roller pull-down window shade.

[Rob Daglish]

Re: In the old days, we said welcome aboard

I did wonder. I no longer do, sometimes you have to do something to gain knowledge. In this case, the knowledge was of pain and what swearing sounds like when your tongue doesn't work properly. It's good knowledge, but I probably won't do it again...

[PRR]

I am experienced. Gawd I'm experienced.

Long long ago I got a 30 volt supply *backward*. (In my defense they used an odd color convention; but I coulda checked.)

Then later I replaced a 8088 CPU with a V20 CPU. (20% more speed.) 40 pin DIP fits fine either way. Backward it becomes a $40 diode. In the cheap PC we had it pulled the power supply to 1 Volt and cooked. But when I got a clue, and turned it around, it ran fine for years. NEC made them tough as rocks.

[Anonymous IV]

Reverse polarity

My knowledge of electronics is quite minuscule but wouldn't one or two additional components (like a diode?) on the Raspberry Pi motherboard have been a pretty neat idea to protect from accidental 5V polarity reversal? Trivial additional cost for a degree of user-stupidity protection.

[that one in the corner]

Re: Reverse polarity

Sticking polarity reversal into the primary power input plug(s) on a board is a reasonable suggestion (although the Pi normally uses USB connectors for power, add-ons may use barrel jacks which are well-known to be a PITA as you have to verify the voltage and polarity every. single. time!).

However, sticking a HAT in the wrong way round connects 40 pins to all the wrong places, with multiple +ve lines, at two levels, and a good handful of GNDs. Putting diodes in to try to protect against the five bad ways of doing it will lead to more problems, both with leakages AND with the fact that it is perfectly ok for the main 5V power to flow in either direction (fed from the Pi or from the HAT - ref the ramblings, above, about whether the HAT was meant to be supplying power to the Pi or t'other way around).

The connector pinout *could* be designed so that only one way round made any connections at all, by using a keyed connector or by using a huge one with lots and lots of no-connection positions, but raise the costs quite significantly, both of manufacture (of Pi and HAT) but also for the hobbyist/pupil who can, as things stand, just pop bare wires or inexpensive "dupont" jumper leads into the GPIO. Only applying power after carefully checking the connections, of course.

For the casual hobbyist user, HATs are generally designed to go on "the obvious way", stacking neatly with the main board and all the fixing holes lining up so the bolts/standoffs supplied with the HAT fit without (too many) cracking noises. And there are plenty of pictures showing how these things go together.

For techies there are flying leads and extension cables and various different types of header pins that one can choose to use instead of doing it the simple way, but by that point ine is also expected to take some care, trace along the connections before applying power to anything...

For some microcontroller boards you can get variants with extra robust circuitry added all around the MCU, with (varying levels of) protection on every pin and even LEDs to show the status of every line; most often this is some for a "classic" Arduino Uno work-alike with a 5V Atmega MCU which is already a tad more robust than the faster devices like a R'Pi. HOWEVER these boards, great though they are for starting off on an MCU project, are not actually capable of doing everything that the cheaper, "more vulnerable", boards can do: the extra loading on the pins gets in the way of fun stuff like using GPIO pins for touch pads and even some of the simple experiments with the analogue i/o.

Bottom line: you have to be careful plugging things into bus connectors and there ain't really any way around that (not at a cost which everybody is willing to bear).

[Will Godfrey]

Sometimes you win

One design job I did I knew the assemblers were not exactly the brightest. The kit required both 12V and 5V. I used a 6 pin reversible plug. The inner pins were ground, the next two out were +5V and the outer pins were +12V. Also the socket was fully shrouded, so short of using a hammer it was impossible to miss-align the plug.

P.S. Of course, some of them still managed to screw up in other ways though.

[that one in the corner]

Re: Sometimes you win

> the socket was fully shrouded, so short of using a hammer

Shroud, meet sidecutters!

Although I trust you used decent, solid, shrouds that were fully anchored to the cable/board as appropriate, I have a board here where the connectors can now go on either way around: the shrouds, the ones with the moulded keyway, decided to depart from the board. I still have the shrouds, hanging onto the plugs at the end of the flying leads, keyed beautifully.

[Guido Esperanto]

Hey look...

Back in the late 90's,new pc hardware in hand, I managed to plug the keyed power supply into the abit motherboard the wrong way..

Thankfully a quick trip back to Scan, even they didnt suspect a pc enthusiast could be so fucking stupid, so happily replaced the board.

I have zero negative comment on the potential for mis-aligning hat pins

[frankvw]

Murphy's law on electronics...

...states that "Experience is directly proportional to the amount of equipment ruined."

Every burned out RPi is an important lesson learned. Cheap at the price, really.

[42656e4d203239]

Eletrolytic Shotgun

I am sure I have mentioned this before. Back in the '80s I was working at a place that used and serviced some fairly good "desktop" non-IBM computers which had built in printers.

Fairly good because their internal switch-mode PSU had a specific cable that was un-keyed. Back in those days these things were chunky with loads of exciting voltages, on exposed conductors, ready to bite - they were even repairable should things go awry, so competely unlike their modern equivalents which are much smaller and are, essentially, replacable components.

The hardware engineers must have been distracted one day because there was an almighty bang from the adjacent hardware den (I was software). We rushed next door to see what was up and the room was filled with snow filled with the shredded internals of a pair of electrolytics which decided to RUD.

It seems someone had reconnected the cable backwards in a previously fixed, now faulty again, PSU and owed many drinks to, plus new underwear for, the other hardware chaps.

Icon because thats what it sounded like in the room next door...

[Andy The Hat]

Amazing!

An entire story devoted to "plug something in wrong and you may fry it".

Is this the slowliest, FAKIEST NEWS! day story ever?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Amazing!

Well, YOU engaged with it!

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Amazing!

Now now children, behave.

:)

[Legb]

Wasn’t this the essence of the term ‘plug and pray’ in respect to Windows?

Lately more likely to be ‘plunge and prey..’ on your customers wallets and patience?