The HCF (halt and catch fire) postings reminds me of an incident at my first employer Data General (DG). About a year or two after I joined DG, the new generation of machines known as the MV/Eclipse were being designed. Tracy Kidder wrote Soul of a New Machine about the hardware and firmware design teams of the first of these machines (code named Eagle, officially known as MV/8000).
When we started populating the labs with machines for the software groups to port their software to, the lab manager noticed that Field Service (otherwise known as Field Circus) would take out old revision boards when updating the machines, and rather than destroying them, would eventually install them in some other machine. Evidently these boards would pass the simple minded tests Field Circus used, even if they weren't up to the current revision level.
So the lab manager created what he called a circuit tester. It had an AC plug on one side, and two wires on the other side. After using his circuit tester on the old board, it would fail whatever test Field Circus used, and they wouldn't recycle these boards.
