Killer poke

In computer jargon, a killer poke is a method of inducing hardware damage on a machine via insertion of invalid values (see 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 monitor of bitty boxes lacking hardware memory management (such as the IBM PC and Commodore PET).

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This article (or an earlier version of it) contains material from FOLDOC, used with permission.