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Halt and catch fire Definition from Language, Idioms & Slang Dictionaries & Glossaries
halt and catch fire
(hcf) 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 motorola 6800 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.
Halt and catch fire Definition from Encyclopedia Dictionaries & Glossaries
Halt and Catch Fire, known by the mnemonic HCF, refers to several computer machine code instructions that cause the CPU to cease meaningful operation. The expression "catch fire" is usually intended as a joke; in most cases the CPU does not actually catch fire.
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