JargonFile/entries/peek.txt

peek

n.,vt. (and poke ) The commands in most microcomputer BASICs for directly
accessing memory contents at an absolute address; often extended to mean the
corresponding constructs in any HLL (peek reads memory, poke modifies it).
Much hacking on small, non-MMU micros used to consist of peek ing around
memory, more or less at random, to find the location where the system keeps
interesting stuff. Long (and variably accurate) lists of such addresses for
various computers circulated. The results of pokes at these addresses may
be highly useful, mildly amusing, useless but neat, or (most likely) total
lossage (see killer poke ). Since a real operating system provides useful,
higher-level services for the tasks commonly performed with peeks and pokes
on micros, and real languages tend not to encourage low-level memory
groveling, a question like How do I do a peek in C? is diagnostic of the
newbie. (Of course, OS kernels often have to do exactly this; a real kernel
hacker would unhesitatingly, if unportably, assign an absolute address to a
pointer variable and indirect through it.