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It's not necessarily placebo: http://catb.org/jargon/html/magic-story.html

that could the premise to a movie. a kid finds the magic button his grandparent's basement and flips it.

Oh man, you just gave me a flashback to the buffer underrun days in the mid 90s. Even moving the mouse in Windows 95 could cause a bad burn and render a (then expensive) CD-R useless. I’m glad that was short lived.

But if you didn't move the mouse, the screensaver would kick in, and then you would definitely get a buffer underrun.

I got more reliable CD burns on my 14MHz Amiga than I did on my ~200MHz Win95.

that certainly wasn't LED display

It almost certainly was -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven-segment_display