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; used especially of various fairly well-known tricks on bitty boxes[?] without hardware memory management (such as the IBM PC and Commodore PET) that can overload analog electronics in the monitor.

---

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