Some things I've experienced:
- Swapped +5 and +12V in an A590 SCSI controller. Everything looked ok, but then suddenly all 16 memory chips let out a thin wisp of smoke simultaneously, as if they were taunting me :-) Luckily nothing else fried but the RAM.
- A friend of mine brought me a PC that "just stopped running". I plugged it in and BOOM, lots of sparks out of the PSU. He had left the power switch in the on position when the PSU automatically shut itself down..
- The Dell Latitude CPi has a type fault that fries the CPU.. Well, my CPi did this too.. I was debugging it and running it without the keyboard.. Ok, I reseated the CPU and powered the beast up again, and whoa, again quite a few chips smouldered to ashes before my eyes.. Bye bye CPU module, bye bye motherboard.
- My C1942 suddenly started flickering and then the picture faded into a line. At the same time I saw smoke coming out of the ventilation grille on the side of the monitor casing.. I quickly powered down, but the monitor was fried.. Luckily the last finnish Amiga repairman was able to get it running again.
There's been others, but those were among the most memorable..
