27 May
2014
27 May
'14
11:08 a.m.
Halt and Catch Fire is not a real computer instruction
that caused a race
condition that made the computer stop working. I imagine a bunch of
teenagers are scouring Intel technical manuals looking for the Code 2 Duo
equivalent of HCF.
I thought there was at least one microprocessor (Motorola 6800?) where an
undocumented instruction would cause the processor to simply do memory
cycles at the fasted posible rate, address incrementing each time, and
the procesosr ignored all inputs apart from reset.
While the machine did not catch fire, the system was essentailly locked
up until the hardware reset.
-tony