[Kristine1975]

>when there was an intense debate on whether a software could cause damage to some hardware.

A more recent debate (TL;DR: yes, software can cause damage to hardware): https://superuser.com/questions/313850/

[Breakthrough]

As the person who wrote the accepted answer to that question, I'm flattered to see it linked here. (I'm also a bit embarrassed at reading some of my older rambling-style writing, but nothing beats experience :)

While my forray into malicious floppy disks didn't end with physical damage, I did manage to make one similar to DBAN. If you booted the computer with the floppy inserted, all drives would be formatted instantly, without any user input.

Fortunately, even in highschool​ I realized they probably imaged the school machines anyways. Probably...

[woliveirajr]

Mine answer is there too but with much less points, the kill FDD thing :)

[speps]

Previous related discussion (about the new MacBooks having their speakers blown out when running Bootcamp) : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13063325

[xrisk]

This actually happened to me, but I was on i3 and using pactl to set audio volume. I'd given my laptop to someone and they increased the volume to 300% or so and my right speaker blew.