Killer poke
In computer jargon, a killer poke is a method of inducing physical hardware damage on a machine 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.) == Specific examples == === Zuse Z1/Z3 === The Z1 (1938) and Z3 (1941) computers built by Konrad Zuse contained illegal sequences of instructions which damaged the hardware if executed by accident.