Hacker News Reader

Comment by therein | Hacker News Reader

I am sure many are familiar but I found it amusing when someone explained to me why it is called magic smoke.

It is because electronics work through magic so when you let the magic smoke out, they stop working.

I’ve never heard it called magic smoke before, but a regular saying at one of my old jobs was “ah yeah we let the smoke out” in relation to 100% electric drive vehicles. Smoked many inverters, shorted 96v bus to a 24v bus, etc.

It was almost a rite of passage to “let the smoke out” in that org. That job was actually great because as a software engineer I happily spent a lot of time with a fluke, a wrench, arm buried in the bowels of a vehicle fishing out sockets, etc. Writing the software was not the hardest part of those programs, but being one of the handful of folks that knew the entire electrical, cooling, mechanical, and software systems made us the most valuable folks on the program. We had to know all those things in order to write the software correctly.

In the early 80s we used to say electronics ran on magic pixie dust, and when you let the pixie dust out as smoke, the magic went away.

Hackers dictionary: http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/M/magic-smoke.html

Devices run on magic smoke. When something bad happens the smoke escapes and thus the device no longer works.

This is proven by observation - the only thing you see charge is the smoke escaping.

The presentation helps a lot too, the way I was told it was something like:

“Did you know that computers actually run on magic smoke? Once the magic smoke comes out though, it stops working.”

It's the soul leaving the IC.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com