This article is about the hardware damage method. For the WCW incident, see The Fingerpoke of Doom. The Fingerpoke of Doom is the common Nickname for a pivotal storyline in American Professional wrestling history that happened on January
In computer jargon, a killer poke is a method of inducing hardware damage (i. For Wikipedia jargon see WikipediaGlossary. For hacker slang see Jargon File. Typical PC hardware A typical Personal computer consists of a case or chassis in a tower shape (desktop and the following parts Motherboard e. , actual physical, irreversible damage) on a machine and/or its peripherals by the insertion of invalid values, via e. For an account of the words periphery and peripheral as they are used in biology sociology politics computer hardware and other fields see the g. BASIC's POKE command, into a memory-mapped control register. In Computer programming, BASIC (an Acronym for Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) is a family of High-level programming languages This article is about BASIC statements Peek & Poke is also the title of an album by White Town In Computing, PEEK is a BASIC Memory-mapped I/O ( MMIO) and port I/O (also called port-mapped I/O or PMIO) are two complementary methods of performing Input/output In Digital electronics, especially Computing, a hardware register stores bits of information in a way that all the bits can be written to or read out simultaneously 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 PC and Commodore PET; a similar trick is reported having been done to Atari ST displays). Analogue electronics (or analog in American English) are those electronic systems with a continuously Variable signal The cathode ray tube (CRT is a Vacuum tube containing an Electron gun (a source of electrons and a Fluorescent screen with internal or A visual display unit, often called simply a monitor or display, is a piece of Electrical equipment which displays images generated from the Video A sanity test or sanity check is a basic test to quickly evaluate the validity of a claim or calculation The PET ( P ersonal E lectronic T ransactor) was a home -/ Personal computer produced by Commodore starting in 1977 The Atari ST is a home / Personal computer that was commercially available from 1985 to the early 1990s
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Specific Examples
The Commodore PET
The PET-specific killer poke is connected to the architecture of that machine's video rasterizer circuits. The PET ( P ersonal E lectronic T ransactor) was a home -/ Personal computer produced by Commodore starting in 1977 In early model PETs, writing a certain value to the memory address of a certain I/O register made the machine able to display text on the screen much faster. Memory-mapped I/O ( MMIO) and port I/O (also called port-mapped I/O or PMIO) are two complementary methods of performing Input/output When the PET range was revamped with updated hardware, it was quickly discovered that performing the old trick on the new hardware led to disastrous behavior by the new video chip, causing it to destroy the PET's integrated CRT monitor. The cathode ray tube (CRT is a Vacuum tube containing an Electron gun (a source of electrons and a Fluorescent screen with internal or
TRS-80 Model III
The TRS-80 Model III had the ability to switch between a 40-character-wide display and an 80-character display. TRS-80 was Tandy Corporation 's desktop Microcomputer model line sold through Tandy's Radio Shack stores in the late 1970s and early Doing so actuated a relay in the video hardware, and was accomplished by writing to a specific memory-mapped control register. Programs that repeatedly switched between 40 and 80 character modes at high speed (either on purpose or accidentally) could permanently damage the video hardware. While this is not a single "killer poke", it demonstrates a software failure mode that could permanently damage the hardware. Failure causes are defects in design process quality or part application which are the underlying cause of the failure or which initiate a process which leads to failure
Acorn Systems BBC Micro
The BBC Micro from Acorn Computers, popular in British schools, had a built in relay for controlling an external tape recorder. Acorn Computers was a British Computer company established in Cambridge, England, in 1978 Many 'computer studies' classes in the late 1980's resounded to the buzz of smart-alec schoolkids toggling the motor control relay in a tight loop, which reduced the relay's longevity. A " smart alec " or " smart aleck " is a person regarded as obnoxiously self-assertive and an impudent person (This example is not unique to the BBC Micro; other computers of the cassette-recorder-storage era, such as the TRS-80 Model 100, could have the tape relay similarly controlled. )
Protecting from this and similar problems
Any system that meets Popek and Goldberg virtualization requirements can be made immune to any killer poke entirely by software means. The Popek and Goldberg virtualization requirements are a set of sufficient conditions for a computer architecture to efficiently support system Virtualization. The reason is that the VMM is required to intercept all the privileged instructions, which include sensitive and dangerous ones such as POKE, making it possible to then filter dangerous instances of that instruction. In Computing, a hypervisor, also called virtual machine monitor, is a virtualization platform that allows multiple Operating systems to run on
See also
External links
This article was originally based on material from the Free On-line Dictionary of Computing, which is licensed under the GFDL. Halt and Catch Fire, known by the Mnemonic HCF, was originally a fictitious computer Machine code instruction claimed to be under development at IBM f00f (ˈfuːf an Abbreviation of f0 0f c7 c8 is the Hexadecimal encoding of an instruction that exhibits a Design flaw in the majority of The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing ( FOLDOC) is an online searchable encyclopedic Dictionary of Computing subjects The GNU Free Documentation License ( GNU FDL or simply GFDL) is a Copyleft License for free documentation designed by the Free Software
Dictionary
killer poke
-noun
- (computing) 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.
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