Word.ws English Dictionary

killer poke

Syllables: kil·ler pokeUK/ˈkɪlə(ɹ)pəʊk/US/ˈkɪlɚ poʊk/

killer poke noun: any method of inducing 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.

killer poke: any method of inducing physical harm to a computer or peripheral by software means, especially by...
Image: Rama & Musée Bolo, CC BY-SA 2.0 fr, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

killer poke (plural killer pokes)

  1. Any method of inducing 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.
    • 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...[1996, Eric S[teven] Raymond, comp., The New Hacker's Dictionary, 3rd edition, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, →ISBN, page 270
    • [F]rom what I recall the "killer poke" was POKE 59458,62 […] [W]hat it did was change an I/O line from input to output. The line connected to a signal related to vertical sync. The ROM routines that wrote to the display would wait until it was in vertical blank to avoid the "video snow" that...1999 November 9, Markus Wandel, “Blowing Processors”, in alt.folklore.computers (Usenet), message-ID <809ej1$2ip$1@bcarh8ab.ca.nortel.com>

Examples of killer poke in a sentence

  • [F]rom what I recall the "killer poke" was POKE 59458,62 […] [W]hat it did was change an I/O line from input to output.1999 November 9, Markus Wandel, “Blowing Processors”, in alt.folklore.computers (Usenet), message-ID <809ej1$2ip$1@bcarh8ab.ca.nortel.com>:
  • Is frying someone's laptop remotely with a killer poke even possible?2015 March 9, Danny Bradbury, “Should we hack the hackers?: Western companies are being fleeced for hundreds of millions by cybercriminals....

Forms of killer poke

pluralkiller pokes

Origin of killer poke

killer + poke (“the storage of a value in a memory address, typically to modify the behaviour of a computer program”).

Questions about killer poke

What does killer poke mean?
Killer poke means any method of inducing 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.
How do you use killer poke in a sentence?
[F]rom what I recall the "killer poke" was POKE 59458,62 […] [W]hat it did was change an I/O line from input to output.
What part of speech is killer poke?
Killer poke is a noun.
How do you pronounce killer poke?
Killer poke is pronounced /ˈkɪlə(ɹ)pəʊk/ (UK).
What is the plural of killer poke?
The plural of killer poke is killer pokes.

Words near killer poke in the dictionary

  1. killer instinct
  2. killer instincts
  3. killer language
  4. killer languages
  5. killer litter
  6. killer poke
  7. killer pokes
  8. killer sudoku
  9. killer sudokus
  10. killer T cell
  11. killer T cells

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: killer poke (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-au-killer poke.ogg.

Cite this entry: “killer poke.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/killer_poke. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.