Catch and Halt Fire - Drama set in early days of personal computing

Not a race condition, no. But the Jargon File entry for HCF says Mnemonic for `Halt and Catch Fire', any of several undocumented and semi-mythical machine instructions with destructive side-effects, supposedly included for test purposes on several well-known architectures going as far back as the IBM 360. The MC6800 microprocessor was the first for which an HCF opcode became widely known. This instruction caused the processor to toggle a subset of the bus lines as rapidly as it could; in some configurations this could actually cause lines to burn up. Compare killer poke. The referenced entry ("killer poke") says 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. It seems obvious to me that this/these is/are what the subject show is alluding to, mangled as usual by writers who don't actually understand what they're writing about. /~\ The ASCII Mouse \ / Ribbon Campaign X Against HTML mouse at rodents-montreal.org / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B