The bomb

icon An icon () is a religious work of art, most commonly a painting, in the cultures of the Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, Catholic Church, Catholic, and Lutheranism, Lutheran churches. The most common subjects include Jesus, Mary, mother of ...

(💣), usually depicted as a black sphere with sparking fuse has several different applications in

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

, 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 lost ...

In computing

Mac OS

The bomb icon in Mac OS is a

symbol A symbol is a mark, Sign (semiotics), sign, or word that indicates, signifies, or is understood as representing an idea, physical object, object, or wikt:relationship, relationship. Symbols allow people to go beyond what is known or seen by cr ...

Susan Kare Susan Kare ( "care"; born February 5, 1954) is an American artist and graphic designer, who contributed graphical user interface, interface elements and typefaces for the first Apple Inc., Apple Macintosh 128k, Macintosh personal computer from ...

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 Mac (computer), Macintosh family of personal computers by Apple Computer, Inc. from 1984 to 2001, starting with System 1 and end ...

offered no

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 h ...

, 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 misbehavi ...

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

debugger A debugger is a computer program used to test and debug other programs (the "target" programs). Common features of debuggers include the ability to run or halt the target program using breakpoints, step through code line by line, and display ...

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 Unix (, ; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multi-user 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, a ...

kernel panic A kernel panic (sometimes abbreviated as KP) is a safety measure taken by an operating system's Kernel (operating system), kernel upon detecting an internal Fatal system error, fatal error in which either it is unable to safely recover or con ...

or a

Windows NT Windows NT is a Proprietary software, proprietary Graphical user interface, graphical operating system produced by Microsoft as part of its Windows product line, the first version of which, Windows NT 3.1, was released on July 27, 1993. Original ...

Blue Screen of Death The blue screen of death (BSoD) or blue screen error, blue screen, fatal error, bugcheck, and officially known as a stop erroris a fatal system error, critical error screen displayed by the Microsoft Windows operating systems to indicate a cr ...

could be. Mac OS Classic bomb boxes were often ridiculed for providing little or no useful information about the error, presenting only information such as "System Error 11" or "address 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 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 used b ...

to the developer. In

Mac OS X macOS, previously OS X and originally Mac OS X, is a Unix, Unix-based operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 2001. It is the current operating system for Apple's Mac (computer), Mac computers. With ...

, being based on BSD's UNIX-like kernel, 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 a suite of developer tools for building apps on Apple devices. It includes an integrated development environment (IDE) of the same name for macOS, used to develop software for macOS, iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, tvOS, and visionOS. It w ...

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

system call In computing, a system call (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, accessing a hard disk drive ...

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 TOS may refer to: General * Terms of service * The original series of a particular media, in contrast to a spin-off Chemistry * Tosyl, a chemical group * Gy's sampling theory (abbreviation) Entertainment * '' Star Trek: The Original Ser ...

-based systems, such as the

Atari ST Atari ST is a line of personal computers from Atari Corporation and the successor to the company's Atari 8-bit computers, 8-bit computers. The initial model, the Atari 520ST, had limited release in April–June 1985, and was widely available i ...

, 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 (computing), processor for which the data processing logic and control is included on a single integrated circuit (IC), or a small number of ICs. The microprocessor contains the arithmetic, logic, a ...

. 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 vapour resulting from a large explosion. The effect is most commonly associated with a nuclear explosion, but any sufficiently e ...

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, division (mathematics), division where the divisor (denominator) is 0, zero, is a unique and problematic special case. Using fraction notation, the general example can be written as \tfrac a0, where a is the di ...

* 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

As a dingbat and an emoji

Bomb symbol was present in Microsoft

Wingdings Wingdings is a series of dingbat typeface, fonts that render letters as a variety of symbols. They were originally developed in 1990 by Microsoft by combining glyphs from Lucida (font), Lucida Icons, Arrows, and Stars licensed from Charles Bige ...

dingbats font developed in 1990 and in early Japanese

emoji An emoji ( ; plural emoji or emojis; , ) is a pictogram, logogram, ideogram, or smiley embedded in text and used in electronic messages and web pages. The primary function of modern emoji is to fill in emotional cues otherwise missing from type ...

implementations; subsequently 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