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 (see interrupt list). The results of
`poke's 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.)