Back in 1986 the U.S. Army wanted all their officers to be computer literate, so they gave Toshiba laptops to anyone attending an advanced school. They took about a week to show everyone how to use the different programs they came with. When they were teaching us how to use the spreadsheet program they made the mistake of telling us how to program a cell or a range with the value of "infinity."

Being the curious type, I thought I would try it out, so I set up a spreadsheet with the first row going from cell A1 to "infinity." I set the columns to do the same. Then I assigned a value of "infinity" to all the cells in the first row and all the cells in the first column. I then put a formula in all the remaining cells that multiplied the value of the first cell of the row they were in by the value of the first cell in the column they were in. Basically all the cells in the spreadsheet had a value of either "infinity" or "infinity*infinity" and the X and Y axis went out to infinity. Then I hit the "Enter" button.

The computer processed for a few seconds then made a sound that to this day I have never heard made by another computer. The closest I can describe it would be to say that it sounded like the noise some pinball machines make when you win a free game, kind of a "CLACK." Then the machine froze up completely. After a few minutes I called an instructor over. He couldn't do anything so he called over a few more. It had completely locked up. They couldn't even turn it off. They took it away and gave me another computer, with which I was a little more careful.