What is "killer poke"

n. (context computing English) Any method of inducing actual physical harm to a computer or peripheral by software means, especially by inserting invalid values into a control register or by building up harmonic oscillations in a hard disk etc.

In computer jargon, a killer poke is a method of inducing physical hardware damage on a machine and/or its peripherals by the insertion of invalid values, via, for example, BASIC's POKE command, into a memory-mapped control register. The term is typically used to describe a family of fairly well known tricks that can overload the analog electronics in the CRT monitors of computers lacking hardware sanity checking (notable examples being the IBM Portable and Commodore PET.)