Back in 1993 I was thumbing through a book about assembly programming for MS-DOS, and it seemed that you could theoretically cause all kinds of hardware problem

Back in 1993 I was thumbing through a book about assembly programming for MS-DOS, and it seemed that you could theoretically cause all kinds of hardware problems. IIRC the method that stood out to me at the time was intentionally accelerating disk drive motors. Were there built-in limits? On some drives or all? The book didn't say. I'm still not sure I read that right, but man was it fascinating to think about all the control one could wield over the head of one's high school electronics teacher and his room full of new PC's.