Xref: utzoo rec.humor:19862 rec.humor.d:1762 comp.misc:5505
Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!mitel!sce!cognos!geovision!pt
From: pt@geovision.uucp (Paul Tomblin)
Newsgroups: rec.humor,rec.humor.d,comp.misc
Subject: Re: Looking for Computer Folklore
Message-ID: <569@geovision.UUCP>
Date: 13 Mar 89 17:15:53 GMT
References: <864@jato.Jpl.Nasa.Gov> <2047@tank.uchicago.edu> <36549@vax1.tcd.ie>
Reply-To: geovision!pt (Paul Tomblin)
Organization: GeoVision Corp, Ottawa, Canada
Lines: 27

In article <36549@vax1.tcd.ie> belld@vax1.tcd.ie writes:
>		I remember hearing that an early version of the Commodore
>Pet would catch fire if certain addresses had certain contents. Something
>about the clock being forced to run at too high a speed. (Can anyone confirm/
>deny this?)

It's true, the Fat40 (4032) would do this.  It was called the Killer Poke.
Anyone with money to burn could try this one to amaze thier friends :-)
Especially after telling them that there's no way to hurt a computer
from the keyboard.

For full points, any body remember the value?
The only one I remember from my Fat40 days was the basic instruction WAIT,
which was supposed to wait until a memory location reached a certain value
(for monitoring memory mapped i/o or ISRs).  If you typed WAIT 6502,n
it would respond "MICROSOFT!" n times.  This is evidently a way to protect
your stuff against piracy.  If somebody claimed they just mimiced your
program without copying it, you could use the undocumented quirks as evidence.
There was a word process for the Pet that would play Pomp and Circumstance if
you held down a certain 3 keys!  Very useful for a word processor, but I'd
rather have a Page Preview mode. :-)

-- 
Paul Tomblin,  Second Officer, Golgafrinchan B Ark      | Canada's Acid Lakes:
    UUCP:   nrcaer!cognos!geovision!pt ??               | 150,000 Points of 
    Disclaimer: The opinions expressed here aren't      | Blight.
    necessarily even mine!                              |