Letting the Smoke Out

Way back in the previous century when I had my game company, my advertising guy told me his theory of electronics, to wit:

Enderlin's Theory of Electronics
There is nothing inside an electric or electronic appliance that does anything. The guts are just there for show and so the manufacturers can charge more for them. In reality, they all run on smoke which is injected under pressure into the item at the factory. As long as the smoke stays inside, the piece will continue working. If you should ever let the smoke out, the appliance's "life force" is gone and it will no longer work.

I let the smoke out of my PC's monitor this morning.

It may not have been my fault. The PC is ancient, originally purchased around 1991 with both processor and memory upgraded multiple times since then. The peripherals, except for the printer which doesn't work either (but that's a software issue), are original. The screen image on the monitor, a CRT box as deep as it is wide, suddenly collapsed in on itself forming a vertical line down the center. Pressing the "de-Gauss" button brought it back for a minute but it relapsed permanently. At least, I think it was permanent because that's when the smoke started to make its escape and I quickly unplugged the monitor from the power strip and the box itself.

I've been putting off transferring all the PC files to the laptop mostly because the PC is so old it and the laptop do not have compatible transfer media. I'm going to have to get them off the PC on diskettes and then move them to CDs before the laptop can accept them. But now, I suppose, I have no choice.

It's only a matter of time before the smoke leaks out of the CPU, too.