Killer poke
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In computer jargon, a killer poke is a method of inducing hardware damage (i.e., actual physical, irreversible damage) on a machine and/or its peripherals by the insertion of invalid values, via e.g. the BASIC-command POKE, into a memory-mapped control register.
The term is used especially of various fairly well-known tricks that can overload the analog electronics in the CRT monitors of bitty boxes lacking hardware memory management (such as the IBM PC and Commodore PET). A similar trick is reported having been done to Atari ST displays.
See also: HCF (Halt and Catch Fire)
The above is from JargonFile.
The Commodore PET specific Killer Poke is unique to the architecture of the PET's video rasteriser. In the early model PET, writing a certain value to a certain memory address caused the video chip to run quite a bit faster. The exact mechanism by which this happened is unknown, probably to do with not waiting on the CPU as much for memory access. When PET was revamped with updated hardware, it was quickly discovered that performing the same trick had a disasterous effect on the video chip, causing it to destroy the integrated CRT.
- This article was originally based on material from the Free On-line Dictionary of Computing, which is licensed under the GFDL.