We were group debugging a crash that happened while using our API for a network device for NetWare under heavy load. We weren’t sure if the problem was our code

We were group debugging a crash that happened while using our API for a network device for NetWare under heavy load. We weren’t sure if the problem was our code or the IPX driver we had written for the particular NIC, so we were swapping in every NIC we had in the lab, and running some samples. Actually, I was doing the swapping. Turns out, the one time I forgot to power down was removing an NE-1000 (cheapest NIC available) and swapping in a 3Com 3C505, worth about $900 in 1988 dollars. The NE-1000 was fine, but the 3C505 was toasted. The PC was fine. The boss totally clowned me with some mean mugging, then smiled and said it was ok.