Halt and Catch Fire

In computer engineering, Halt and Catch Fire, known by the assembly mnemonic HCF, is a euphemism referring to a computer machine code instruction that causes the computer's central processing unit (CPU) to cease meaningful operation, typically requiring a restart of the computer. This originally referred to a fictitious instruction in IBM System/360 computers, but later computer developers who saw the joke created real versions of this instruction for some machines. In the case of real instructions the implication of this expression is that, whereas in most cases when a CPU executes an unintended instruction (a bug in the code) the computer may still be able to recover, but in the case of an HCF instruction there is, by definition, no way for the system to recover without a restart.