I cannot believe it. I thought it was brain dead.
- Two months after introduction of the Apple III, only three software programs were available for it, one of them a mail management program written by Apple’s Mike Markkula. New programs were not expected for six months. The Apple III’s software and hardware were very buggy; it would often crash when using the Save command, causing great frustration to journalists using the computer.
The result of the fault-ridden design was that the motherboard quickly got too hot and warped, causing chips to pop out of their sockets, resulting in severe problems with the entire system.
Dan Kottke, one of Apple’s first employees, discovered the solution to the Apple III’s problem. One day he picked the machine up a couple of inches in frustration and slammed it down on his desk. The III jumped back to life. Kottke knew it was a faulty connector, but he didn’t tell anyone, as he was a “lowly engineer” (the phrase Jobs used to explain why he wouldn’t give him stock options). This was Kottke’s revenge.
Apple’s official suggestion to customers in response to this problem was to pickup the Apple III system and drop it onto a desk to reseat the chips temporarily. As if that wasn’t enough, the built-in real-time clock stopped working after several hours of use, and the Apple II Plus emulation didn’t always work properly.
http://lowendmac.com/2015/apple-iii-chaos-apples-first-failure/
This is not a "secret button combo"
Pressing and holding the power button on computers, when there is no power connected, discharges/grounds a lot of the capacitors and other things. Doing this causes things that were "on" and supposed to be "off' to actually turn off, and truly resets everything.
I had an old computer that you could unplug, and it would run for about half a second if you hit the power button again, it wasn't until you did that that it would actually finish being "reset".