> This meant we needed to write a quick shell script to loop from 0 to 255 and try to output to screen the ASCII representation [...] The computer locked-up and we needed to hard-reset it
That sounds like you echoed a Ctrl-S character, which tells a terminal to stop updating; the opposite command is Ctrl-Q, but since that came earlier in your sequence rather than later, you were out of luck.
Try reversing the for-loop next time!