Serious question from back in my young impressionable days of What Even Is This Square Thing Anyway: I once wanted to copy/record the layout of a particular PC

Serious question from back in my young impressionable days of What Even Is This Square Thing Anyway: I once wanted to copy/record the layout of a particular PC's boot up sequence, and (without a camera) got the great idea (uh oh) to use the Pause key while staring at the BIOS screen. I think... I think it worked too well. Once I'd copied the layout onto paper and hit a key to un-pause the system, it started behaving... very weirdly. I don't remember exactly what it did, but I do remember getting really freaked out because something was very wrong. What I do remember was playing a game (to test/see if the system would settle back down) and, as time went on, keyboard input became progressively less and less responsive and erratic, and the system started beeping like crazy, almost like the keyboard input buffer had indigestion. IIRC, the machine hung shortly thereafter and would not turn back on (read: initialize video and POST). O.o To this day I still wonder what happened to that poor box, and a part of me wants to buy another AT&T Globalist 515 and film it to see if the fault(?) wasn't specific to my machine and maybe figure out exactly what happened. My initial theory was flash corruption; it's also possible I overheated the CPU, especially given the lack of a heatsink, but it was a 486DX2-66, which didn't need a heatsink, and I'd used the Pause key in DOS plenty of times prior with no issues.