killer poke n.

A recipe for inducing hardware damage on a machine via insertion of invalid values (see poke) into a memory-mapped control register; used esp. of various fairly well-known tricks on bitty boxes without hardware memory management (such as the IBM PC and Commodore PET) that can overload and trash analog electronics in the monitor. See also HCF.

--The Jargon File version 4.3.1, ed. ESR, autonoded by rescdsk.