The bomb

icon An icon () is a religious work of art, most commonly a painting, in the cultures of the Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, and Catholic churches. They are not simply artworks; "an icon is a sacred image used in religious devotion". The most ...

(💣) has several different applications in

computing Computing is any goal-oriented activity requiring, benefiting from, or creating computing machinery. It includes the study and experimentation of algorithmic processes, and development of both hardware and software. Computing has scientific, e ...

, and typically indicates a

fatal system error A fatal system error (also known as a system crash, stop error, kernel error, or bug check) occurs when an operating system halts because it has reached a condition where it can no longer operate safely (''i.e.'' where critical data could be l ...

In computing

Mac OS

The bomb icon in Mac OS is a

symbol A symbol is a mark, sign, or word that indicates, signifies, or is understood as representing an idea, object, or relationship. Symbols allow people to go beyond what is known or seen by creating linkages between otherwise very different conc ...

Susan Kare Susan Kare ( "care"; born February 5, 1954) is an American artist and graphic designer best known for her interface elements and typeface contributions to the first Apple Macintosh from 1983 to 1986. She was employee #10 and Creative Director at ...

that was displayed inside the System Error alert box when the "classic" Macintosh operating system had a

crash Crash or CRASH may refer to: Common meanings * Collision, an impact between two or more objects * Crash (computing), a condition where a program ceases to respond * Cardiac arrest, a medical condition in which the heart stops beating * Couch su ...

which the system decided was unrecoverable. Since the

classic Mac OS Mac OS (originally System Software; retronym: Classic Mac OS) is the series of operating systems developed for the Macintosh family of personal computers by Apple Computer from 1984 to 2001, starting with System 1 and ending with Mac OS 9. The ...

offered little

memory protection Memory protection is a way to control memory access rights on a computer, and is a part of most modern instruction set architectures and operating systems. The main purpose of memory protection is to prevent a process from accessing memory that ha ...

, an application crash would often take down the entire system. The bomb symbol first appeared on the original Macintosh in 1984. Often, a reason for the crash, including the error code, was displayed in the dialog. In some cases, a "Resume" button would be available, allowing the user to dismiss the dialog and force the offending program to quit, but most often the resume button would be disabled and the computer would have to be restarted. Originally, the resume button was unavailable unless the running program had provided the OS with code to allow recovery. With the advent of System 7, if the OS thought it could handle recovery, a normal error dialog box was displayed, and the application was forced to quit. This was helped by the classic Mac OS providing a little bit of protection against heap corruption using

guard page Buffer overflow protection is any of various techniques used during software development to enhance the security of executable programs by detecting buffer overflows on stack-allocated variables, and preventing them from causing program misbehavior ...

s; if the application was to crash and the application's heap was corrupt, it could be thrown away. The

debugger A debugger or debugging tool is a computer program used to software testing, test and debugging, debug other programs (the "target" program). The main use of a debugger is to run the target program under controlled conditions that permit the pr ...

program

MacsBug MacsBug is a low-level (assembly language/machine-level) debugger for the classic Mac OS operating system. MacsBug is an acronym for ''Motorola Advanced Computer Systems Debugger'', as opposed to ''Macintosh debugger'' (The Motorola 68000 Micropr ...

was sometimes used even by end users to provide basic (though not always reliable) error recovery, and could be used for troubleshooting purposes, much as the output of a

Unix Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and ot ...

kernel panic A kernel panic (sometimes abbreviated as KP) is a safety measure taken by an operating system's kernel upon detecting an internal fatal error in which either it is unable to safely recover or continuing to run the system would have a higher ...

or a

Windows NT Windows NT is a proprietary graphical operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems sc ...

Blue Screen of Death could be. Mac OS Classic bomb boxes were often ridiculed for providing little or no useful information about the error; this was a conscious decision by the Macintosh team to eliminate any information that the end user could not make sense of. The error code was intended to be included in a bug report to the developer. In

Mac OS X macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. Within the market of ...

, the system architecture is vastly different from that in the

, and an application crash cannot usually bring down the entire system. A

screen (either text overwritten on the screen in older versions, or simplified to a reboot message in more recent versions) replaces the bomb symbol but appears less often due to the radically different system architecture. The bomb symbol is not used in Mac OS X, but a test application called ''Bomb.app'', specifically written to cause a non-fatal crash, is included with

Xcode Xcode is Apple's integrated development environment (IDE) for macOS, used to develop software for macOS, iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, and tvOS. It was initially released in late 2003; the latest stable release is version 14.2, released on December 13, ...

and uses a rendition of the bomb symbol as its icon. In the original Mac OS, the

system call In computing, a system call (commonly abbreviated to syscall) is the programmatic way in which a computer program requests a service from the operating system on which it is executed. This may include hardware-related services (for example, acc ...

to display a "bomb box" was called DSError, for "Deep Shit". This was deemed obscene, and became the "System Error Manager".

Atari ST TOS

TOS-based systems, such as the

Atari ST The Atari ST is a line of personal computers from Atari Corporation and the successor to the Atari 8-bit family. The initial model, the Atari 520ST, had limited release in April–June 1985 and was widely available in July. It was the first pers ...

, used a row of bombs to indicate a critical system error. The number of bombs displayed revealed information about the occurred error. The error (also called an '' exception'') is reported by the

Motorola 68000 The Motorola 68000 (sometimes shortened to Motorola 68k or m68k and usually pronounced "sixty-eight-thousand") is a 16/32-bit complex instruction set computer (CISC) microprocessor, introduced in 1979 by Motorola Semiconductor Products Sector ...

microprocessor A microprocessor is a computer processor where the data processing logic and control is included on a single integrated circuit, or a small number of integrated circuits. The microprocessor contains the arithmetic, logic, and control circu ...

. The first version of TOS used

mushroom cloud A mushroom cloud is a distinctive mushroom-shaped flammagenitus cloud of debris, smoke and usually condensed water vapor resulting from a large explosion. The effect is most commonly associated with a nuclear explosion, but any sufficiently ener ...

s. * 1 bomb: Reset, Initial PC2 * 2 bombs: Bus Error * 3 bombs: Address Error * 4 bombs: Illegal Instruction * 5 bombs:

Division by zero In mathematics, division by zero is division (mathematics), division where the divisor (denominator) is 0, zero. Such a division can be formally expression (mathematics), expressed as \tfrac, where is the dividend (numerator). In ordinary ari ...

* 6 bombs: CHK Instruction * 7 bombs: TRAPV Instruction * 8 bombs: Privilege Violation * 9 bombs: Trace * 10 bombs: Line 1010 Emulator * 11 bombs: Line 1111 Emulator * 12–13 bombs: Reserved * 14 bombs: Format Error * 15 bombs: Uninitialized Interrupt Vector * 16–23 bombs: Reserved * 24 bombs: Spurious Interrupt * 25 bombs: Level 1 Interrupt Autovector * 26 bombs: Level 2 Interrupt Autovector * 27 bombs: Level 3 Interrupt Autovector * 28 bombs: Level 4 Interrupt Autovector * 29 bombs: Level 5 Interrupt Autovector * 30 bombs: Level 6 Interrupt Autovector * 31 bombs: Level 7 Interrupt Autovector * 32–47 bombs: Trap Instruction Vectors * 48–63 bombs: Reserved * 64–255 bombs: User Interrupt Vectors

Unicode

Bomb emoji was added to

Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs is a Unicode block containing meteorological and astronomical symbols, emoji characters largely for compatibility with Japanese telephone carriers' implementations of Shift JIS, and characters originally from ...

character block in Unicode version 6.0 with code point .

References

External links