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Re:Writing a Bootloader by amiga-workbench on Friday October 20, 2017 @06:58AM (#15514817)
On the Commodore PET you could write a short BASIC program to rapidly change the direction of the tape drive motor, it would fry the transformer that ran it.
Re:Writing a Bootloader by amyjess on Friday October 20, 2017 @12:27PM (#15517036)
I had a coworker who used to be a C64 enthusiast. One day, a very long time ago, he discovered a C64 program on Usenet called "drive music".

He downloaded it and ran it... and his floppy drive started playing music. After playing with it for a while, he heard that using it too much could throw your drive heads out of alignment, so he got rid of it.

Re:Writing a Bootloader by jerrysievert on Friday October 20, 2017 @01:28PM (#15517555)
For me, alignment problems on the 1541 were fairly common (there was a lot of head thrashing when trying to read "protected" disks), which ended up with the 1541 cover being easily removable for me, and always a screwdriver nearby to recalibrate.