Raymond Chen occasionally posts interesting stories from his (long) time at Microsoft. His latest offering tells the story of how Janet Jackson used to have the power to crash laptops. It turned out that playing Jackson’s Rhythm Nation on certain laptops would cause them to crash. A little experimentation showed that playing the music on one laptop could even cause another nearby laptop that wasn’t playing the music to crash.
I’ll let you read Chen’s post to see what was happening and how they fixed it but the interesting thing is that Chen speculates that the fix may still be in place even though the hardware involved is no longer used. It was one of those things were the fix was installed with instructions that it should not be removed and years later no one knew why it was there but were afraid to remove it.
It’s a real problem. Sometimes, like in this case, the fix is no longer doing anything useful but sometimes removing it without a thorough understanding of what it was doing could lead to disaster. Things like this are what make our industry so endlessly engaging.