... in the good old times the processor simply fried itself.

When I was young and stupid (and I am not young anymore :-) ) I and a friend of mine decided to build a "state-of-the-art" PC as cheap as it gets. We went to buy parts to a wholesale (it is not an unusual practice here even today). It was in the times when Pentiums were still hot. The first sign of our amateurism was, that we bought only one memory module (SIMM) per motherboard, whereas the Pentium-class boards required two. The second was, that we run the processor - and it was the cheaper and per advertisement more powerful Cyrix - without any heatsink.

It run the POST apparently flawlessly, but then within seconds after starting DOS it froze (not an appropriate term for a processor failing from overheating, perhaps...).

Another lesson learned...

But, as a matter of fact, the said PC is still in service even today,with the very same cooked processor (but, of course, with a heatsink on it)... It still runs the same W95 (the very first version, no service packs, FAT16 only etc.), so it's quite a bit of time...

JW