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. Atari ST and Macintosh equivalents of a Unix " panic " or Amiga guru , in which icon s 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)