What means
From the built-in graphics of a late-1970s home computer. Ohio Scientific (OSI), an American maker of early personal computers, gave its Challenger machines a character set full of small pictures alongside letters and digits. Programmers placed these pictures on the text screen like letters to draw scenes and simple games without true graphics hardware; an explosion at the horizon is exactly the kind of tile such a screen needed.
A 2021 Unicode proposal mapped this glyph to OSI code 04. The aim was practical: when old programs and screen listings are converted to modern text, or run in emulators (programs that imitate old computers), every character should survive instead of turning into a question mark.
Part of the collection
Don't confuse it with
2
Combination ideas
3Questions people ask
2Why do I see an empty box instead of an explosion?
Your font lacks it. The character arrived in Unicode 16.0 (2024), and many fonts and phones had not drawn it yet. Nothing is broken in the text itself.
Is it an emoji?
No. It is a plain text symbol with no colour version, made for reproducing old computer screens.
More like this
12
Collections with
1
How to type or find
- Search it as
- explosion symbol · ohio scientific · osi · retro computer graphic · text-mode graphic · U+1CE02
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
𜸂\1CE02Codes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.