Bomb (error message)

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The classic Mac OS bomb

The symbol of a bomb in a error message was originally developed by Susan Kare designed and is under the operating system Mac OS (but not since macOS ) appears when the operating system crashes. First the bomb was used in the Macintosh 128k , introduced in 1984 .

Appearance

Error message under Mac OS 7

The display often includes an error message in text form and in some cases a button that could be used to exit the faulty program without restarting the entire device. A button with which the computer can be restarted with a mouse click can also be included. However, with some critical errors, these buttons will no longer work even though they are displayed. The presentation of the error message has often been criticized because it hardly allows any conclusions to be drawn about the actual cause of the error. However, this was a conscious decision by the developers with the aim of eliminating misleading or useless information for most users. However, using a debugger (usually MacsBug or ResEdit ) this information can still be determined.

Mac OS X

macOS was not developed on the basis of its predecessor Mac OS and therefore no longer contains this symbol in error messages. In the event of a system crash , a kernel panic appears here, as with other operating systems from the Unix family .

Atari TOS

Since it was permanently installed in computers as ROM modules, the TOS operating system , which is used on the computers of the Atari ST series and their successors, also uses small bomb symbols to indicate an error. However, only a certain number of bombs, depending on the nature of the problem, appear on the left edge of the screen, halfway up. Errors in individual applications often do not result in the system crashing because TOS originally only allowed the execution of a program at any point in time (with the exception of so-called accessories ) and thus applications running in parallel are not influenced, as is the case with a multitasking operating system can. In such a case, the display disappears after a short time and the device returns to the user interface of the operating system (as long as no fatal errors occurred that make this impossible). The first devices, which were delivered in the late summer of 1985 and which still received the operating system on diskette, used (atomic) mushrooms instead of bombs .

See also