Rollo was a little misleading with his definition of POKE. It is a
Commodore BASIC command, but the command exists in many other
programming languages and works on almost every type of
computer architecture, not just a
Commie.
Here's a
fun story about the POKE
command and it's amazing ability to
destroy hardware. It's possible to set your
monitor on
fire with a single POKE if you're on a
PET computer. Appartently you can change the screen size with POKE on
PET computers. If you set the POKE value to
zero then the computer would attempt to display the entire screen in a single
pixel causing the
phosphor in the monitor to
catch on fire.
Source:
alt.folklore.computers faq