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Article #4355Re: Stupid programming errors
From: wi... William Lewis
Date: Tue, 11 Sep 1990 00:57
Date: Tue, 11 Sep 1990 00:57
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In article <3061.2...@cc.helsinki.fi> mnyk...@cc.helsinki.fi writes: >The original PC could control the voltage going to the monitor, I've >heard, with similar results.. Actually, what could (can) be done was to reprogram the video controller chip to give an unexpected scan rate. This being before Multisync monitors =8) the flyback transformer would start generating lots of extra heat, and could eventually catch fire. (At least I think it was the flyback. The flyback is the generic folklore monitor component, anyway, after maybe the crt itself...) I think that at one time there was even a virus written to do this. However, because you had to *wait* for the heat to build up in the xformer, it took (I hear) about half an hour, with the picture meanwhile completely unreadable, to do any permament damage, so this couldn't exactly be done subtly ... -- wi...@milton.acs.washington.edu Seattle, Washington | No sig under (William Lewis) | 47 41' 15" N 122 42' 58" W |||||||| construction
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Path: mbox-mo1.pugleaf.net!gmdzi!unido!mcsun!uunet!wuarchive!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!samsung!dali.cs.montana.edu!milton!wiml From: wi...@milton.u.washington.edu (William Lewis) Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Subject: Re: Stupid programming errors Summary: IBM PC monitors Message-ID: <7322@milton.u.washington.edu> Date: 11 Sep 90 00:57:40 GMT References: <ben.2630@epmooch.UUCP> <3061.26e54065@cc.helsinki.fi> Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Lines: 19 Posted: Tue Sep 11 01:57:40 1990 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit