Janet Jackson's hit single 'Rhythm Nation' crashed older laptops

One of the frequencies in part of Jackson's single happened to match up perfectly with the natural resonant frequency of the 5,400rpm hard drives used in older laptops. — AFP

Back in the heydays of Windows XP in the early 2000s, an unnamed computer manufacturer made a discovery that was more than just a bit surprising: when the music video for Janet Jackson's 1989 hit single Rhythm Nation was played, certain models of laptops ended up crashing.

In a post made on The Old New Thing, the developer blog on Microsoft's website, Raymond Chen, a principal engineer at the company, elaborated that the manufacturer ended up making some key discoveries while investigating what exactly caused the crashes.