Ongoing History Daily: The weirdest music-and-tech glitch ever involved laptops and Janet Jackson

People who bought Windows laptops around 2005 noticed a weird thing. Whenever someone played Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation within earshot (that is, coming from an audio source other than the computer itself), the laptop would crash.

This puzzled tech support people. Why was this happening? After plenty of investigation, it was discovered that certain frequencies in the song, specifically the music video, created dangerous resonances with the laptop’s hard drive, which then caused the operating system to crash. A

special audio filter had to be deployed so that these frequencies wouldn’t be “heard” by the hard drive. This problem stuck around for several years until Windows was updated. Today, this should never happen because we’ve moved from spinning hard drives to solid-state drives with no moving parts.

Can you imagine the reaction the first people to report this to tech support must have received?