crash
1. n. A sudden, usually drastic failure. Most often said
of the
system (q.v., sense 1), esp. of magnetic disk drives
(the term originally described what happened when the air gap of a
Winchester disk collapses). "Three
lusers lost their files
in last night's disk crash." A disk crash that involves the
read/write heads dropping onto the surface of the disks and
scraping off the oxide may also be referred to as a `head crash',
whereas the term `system crash' usually, though not always,
implies that the operating system or other software was at fault.
2. v. To fail suddenly. "Has the system just crashed?"
"Something crashed the OS!" See
down. Also used
transitively to indicate the cause of the crash (usually a person
or a program, or both). "Those idiots playing
SPACEWAR
crashed the system." 3. vi. Sometimes said of people hitting the
sack after a long
hacking run; see
gronk out.