That is most fun on an Apple II
You get smoke and exploding chips, and a game of "find the dead ICs".
And no, I never heard of alligator memory either, but I presume he had to mean DIPs,
'cause that's how memory came.
Another Apple II fun was to pull a card with the power on (no fan, so it was easy to do). Pull it a little tilted and it blew every board on the bus plus a few ICs on the main board. I used to know exactly which ones had to be replaced.
Since Apple IIs used the video retrace to refresh RAM, a problem almost anywhere on the main board could cause memory problems.
The Apple II design was pure hacker. If something could be done with obscure cleverness to make it cheaper, that's the way it was done, right down to a software disk controller. Even choice of the 6502 processor was based purely on price - the Intel chips were newer and way faster, so they cost more, so they were unnaceptable to Apple.
They charged a whole lot of money for this pile of crap, and worked hard to build a "mystique" to support the price. Even so, it was VisiCalc, not Apple, that made the Apple II a success (Bricklin wouldn't do a CP/M version because he couldn't copy protect it effectively on such an open platform).
