where did the phrase halt and catch fire come from
Halt and Catch Fire One apocryphal story about the HCF instruction in an actual early CPU goes back to the late 1960s, when computers used magnetic core memory.[citation needed] The story goes that in order to speed up the core memory on their next model the engineers increased the read/write currents in the very fine wires that were threaded through the cores. This worked fine when the computer was executing normal programs, since memory accesses were spread throughout memory. However, the HALT instruction was implemented as a "Jump to self". This meant that the same core memory location was repeatedly accessed, and the very fine wires became so hot that they started to smoke—hence the instruction was labeled "Halt and Catch Fire".[29][better source needed]
Ring of Fire (song) Although "Ring of Fire" sounds ominous, the term refers to falling in love â€“ which is what June Carter was experiencing with Johnny Cash at the time. Some sources claim that Carter had seen the phrase "Love is like a burning ring of fire," underlined in one of her uncle A. P. Carter's Elizabethan books of poetry.[3][4] She worked with Kilgore on writing a song inspired by this phrase as she had seen her uncle do in the past. She had written: "There is no way to be in that kind of hell, no way to extinguish a flame that burns, burns, burns".[5]