"The switch had two positions... ‘magic' and ‘more magic'. "

Hilarious story. And Gerry Sussman swears it's completely true.

edit: GLS = Gerry Sussman, creator of Scheme, co-author of SICP, and MIT professor.

From mccoyn's Reddit comment:

"The isolated grounds was what I thought it was while reading the story.

I bet when this was installed, there was a problem with the sound buzzing. Isolating the grounds would make it go away, like magic. But reconnecting the grounds while the computer was on would create a sudden ground change that might crash the computer, more magic."

Being the curious type, I don't think I would have let such an interesting switch sit idly by for a year like this guy did. Why didn't he investigate it further after first making the discovery?

Such a great story though.

At first glance i thought this was about VIM magic...

http://www.vim.org/htmldoc/pattern.html#/magic