killer poke A recipe for 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 box}es without hardware memory management (such as the {IBM PC} and {Commodore} {PET}) that can overload analog electronics in the monitor. See also {HCF}. (1994-11-04)