where did the phrase halt and catch fire come from
Halt and Catch Fire One apocryphal story about the HCF instruction in an actual early CPU goes back to the late 1960s, when computers used magnetic core memory.[citation needed] The story goes that in order to speed up the core memory on their next model the engineers increased the read/write currents in the very fine wires that were threaded through the cores. This worked fine when the computer was executing normal programs, since memory accesses were spread throughout memory. However, the HALT instruction was implemented as a "Jump to self". This meant that the same core memory location was repeatedly accessed, and the very fine wires became so hot that they started to smoke—hence the instruction was labeled "Halt and Catch Fire".[29][better source needed]