Halt and Catch Fire, known by the mnemonic HCF, was originally a fictitious computer machine code instruction claimed to be under development at IBM for use in their System/360 computers, along with many other amusing instructions such as "Execute Operator".
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 HCF instruction was originally a fictitious instruction, claimed to be under development at IBM for use in their System/360 computers, along with many other amusing instructions such as "Execute Operator".