Nah, Portmasters were actually pretty cool. The brand that caught fire, was a briefly-very-popular one that had ISDN-2 routers that had the charming feature of having proxy-ARP turned on by default (so that all traffic on your LAN would egress over that ISDN link...) as well as ISDN-30 rackmounts that, well, melted down when too many people dialed in at the same time.