Bomb (icon)
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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 designed by Susan Kare 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 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
The
In
In the original Mac OS, the system call to display a "bomb box" was called DSError, for "Deep Shit".[1] This was deemed obscene, and became the "System Error Manager".[2]
Atari ST TOS
TOS-based systems, such as the Atari ST, 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 microprocessor. The first version of TOS used mushroom clouds.[3]
- 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[4]
Unicode
Bomb emoji was added to Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs character block in Unicode version 6.0 with code point U+1F4A3 💣 BOMB.[5]
See also
References
- ^ Chris Espinosa [@cdespinosa] (January 25, 2014). "Mac 128K Fun Fact! The 'bomb box' was invoked by the A-trap DSError in the System Error Manager. During development, DS stood for 'deep shi" (Tweet). Archived from the original on 2021-08-18. Retrieved 2021-08-17 – via Twitter.
- ^ Andy Hertzfeld. "Busy Being Born, Part 2". The Original Macintosh. Folklore.org. Retrieved 2008-02-05.
...the bomb icon is "Deep". That's the first word of the original name of the code ... an obscene name, with the API calls prefixed with "DS" ... eventually settling on the more prosaic "System Error" manager.
- ^ Plotkin, David (April 1989). "The New TOS ROM Error Codes". START. Vol. 3, no. 9 – via atarimagazines.com.
- ^ Krynak, Robert (Jun 5, 1991). "Help-Line (Q & A): Re: TOS ERROR 39?". Cleveland Free-Net Atari SIG (Mailing list). Retrieved 2017-09-01 – via atariarchives.org.
- ^ "Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs Range: 1F300–1F5FF The Unicode Standard, Version 6.0" (PDF). unicode.org. Archived (PDF) from the original on 2010-11-25.