My husband would like to borrow my HN account to post this story: While working at either Netscape or AOL (he can't remember which side of the transition it wa

My husband would like to borrow my HN account to post this story: While working at either Netscape or AOL (he can't remember which side of the transition it was), a developer BeBox was delivered, to assist in porting Netscape to BeOS. It was one of the first dual-processor machines that many devs had ever seen. It had an activity monitor which showed two bar graphs for the load of each CPU, but unusually, you could click on each CPU to turn it on and off, to turn the system into a single-CPU machine. He wondered what happened if you turned both off. So he did. The machine obediently froze, and had to be hard rebooted. You'd never find an OS that let you do that today!