bomb

1. software General synonym for crash except that it is

not used as a noun. Especially used of software or OS

failures. "Don't run Empire with less than 32K stack, it'll

bomb".

2. operating system Atari ST and Macintosh equivalents

of a Unix "panic" or Amiga guru, in which icons of

little black-powder bombs or mushroom clouds are displayed,

indicating that the system has died. On the Macintosh, this

may be accompanied by a decimal (or occasionally

hexadecimal) number indicating what went wrong, similar to

the Amiga guru meditation number. MS-DOS computers tend

to lock up in this situation.

3. software A piece of code embedded in a program that

remains dormant until it is triggered. Logic bombs are

triggered by an event whereas time bombs are triggered either

after a set amount of time has elapsed, or when a specific

date is reached.

[Jargon File]

(1996-12-08)