The bomb icon (💣) has several different applications in computing, and typically indicates a fatal system error.

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 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, 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 Heap or HEAP may refer to: Computing and mathematics * Heap (data structure), a data structure commonly used to implement a priority queue * Heap (mathematics), a generalization of a group * Heap (programming) (or free store), an area of memory f ...

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 program MacsBug 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

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 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 A bug tracking system or defect tracking system is a software application that keeps track of reported software bugs in software development projects. It may be regarded as a type of issue tracking system. Many bug tracking systems, such as those ...

to the developer. In Mac OS X, 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 and uses a rendition of the bomb symbol as its icon. In the original Mac OS, the system call 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. The first version of TOS used mushroom clouds. * 1 bomb: Reset, Initial PC2 * 2 bombs: Bus Error * 3 bombs: Address Error * 4 bombs: Illegal Instruction * 5 bombs: Division by zero * 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 character block in Unicode version 6.0 with code point .

References

External links