🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <22...@opus.cs.mcgill.ca>, pet...@opus.cs.mcgill.ca (Peter Deutsch) writes:
> In article <3061.2...@cc.helsinki.fi>, mnyk...@cc.helsinki.fi writes:
> > In article <ben.2630@epmooch.UUCP>, ben@epmooch.UUCP (Rev. Ben A. Mesander) writes:
> > > If memory serves me right, the old Commodore PET machines could be
> > > physically damaged (ie smoke) by poking the wrong value into the wrong
> > > memory location. Good design...
> > The original PC could control the voltage going to the monitor, I've
> > heard, with similar results..
> 
> 
> Survey says! Bzzzzzzzz.
> 
> Sorry, not quite. What you could do was program the
> horizontal and vertical trace frequencies from software.
> Thus, you could set the horizontal frequency to zero. This
> produced a high current through the flyback transformer,
> which would toast it. Once you let the smoke out, it
> wouldn't work any more (The PC screen, like everything
> electronic, runs on smoke).
> 

Actually, back in the days when the big, bad software companies thought
they could get away with copy protection, there was a system developed that
would do this to your monitor if it determined you were using an
illegal copy.  As I remember the PC-Week article, Ashton-Tate was looking
at using this on dBase III.  Talk about user-unfriendly software :-?


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