The Thirteen Greatest Error Messages of All Time

Technologizer writes "They add insult to injury — and computing wouldn't be the same without 'em. So I rounded up a baker's dozen of the most important error messages in computing history — from Does Not Compute to Abort, Retry, Fail to the Sad Mac to the big kahuna of them all — the mighty Blue Screen of Death. And just in case my judgment is off, I include a poll to let the rest of the world vote for the greatest error message of all." I can't believe that "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that" didn't make the list.

Comments

and the fourteenth error should be...

[houbou]

Error, Windows Vista detected on Drive C: prepare to acknowledge, confirm and reboot.

Re:and the fourteenth error should be...

[doti]

Who is General Failure, and why is he reading my hard drive?

Re:and the fourteenth error should be...

[Ryogo]

Error: Keyboard not found. Press F1 to continue.

go away.

[thhamm]

missing /etc/passwd, tried to login as root:
"you don't exist. go away."

Kernel Panic!!!

[WED Fan]

Kernel Panic? Why not just teach that damned kernel some self-defense lessons. Or, at least tell it to grow a set of balls. Just stop the damned Panic.

Re:Kernel Panic!!!

[nbert]

cd /usr/src/linux && egrep -ir "( fuck)|( shit)" *

Technically most are not error messages, but they are quite interesting.

One I'm missing in the list is "Too many colors". Some very old windows programs refused to work when gfx was set to more than 256 colors.

Re:Kernel Panic!!!

[Malevolyn]

Actually, I've had "ERROR: No error" before. I'm going to have to say that's much more frustrating, especially when it prevents the program from continuing.

Re:Kernel Panic!!!

[Daniel Dvorkin]

It's not Panic's fault. He's only following the orders of General Protection Fault.

Re:Kernel Panic!!!

[Almahtar]

Yep. That one's pretty bad, but I've also seen "Error: SUCCESS". I was baffled.

Re:Kernel Panic!!!

[Annymouse Cowherd]

My favorite:
Keyboard not found. Press F1 to continue, Del to enter Setup.

Re:Kernel Panic!!!

[FatdogHaiku]

I always like the windows "Unexpected Error", it made me feel like someone is sitting around thinking "Well, we expected errors, but... THIS!?!?

Re:Kernel Panic!!!

[sean4u]

My first admin responsibility was an AT&T 3B2 400, running SYSVR4. The bad days always had a slightly comical edge to them. Who couldn't feel sorry for a console that said only:

KERNEL: DOUBLE PANIC
The kernel panicked while trying to panic

I couldn't find that on Google just now. Damn kids and their hardened systems.

Your site is padded with ads. Continue?

[Anonymous Coward]

Somehow, spreading an article across many, many ad-ridden pages is not considered an error.

The error no one wishes to hear.

[houbou]

Error, Water Detected in Drive C:

They missed it:

[LibertineR]

"Congratulations, your Lotus Notes installation is complete."

Divide by cucumber error

[reydelamirienda]

+++ Divide By Cucumber Error. Please Reinstall Universe And Reboot +++

Re:Divide by cucumber error

[LordEd]

++?????++ Out of Cheese Error. Redo From Start.

the BSOD screensaver

[gardyloo]

I just run the "BSOD" screensaver on my linux machine, with all error messages enabled. I love having people come in, pause, say, "Um... looks like your machine is really screwed up". Then I bump the machine out of screensaver mode, and their jaws drop.

Re:the BSOD screensaver

[snspdaarf]

We had a guy do that at my office. The boss comes in, sees the BSOD, decides to help out, flips the big red switch on the PC. Hosed the boot sector on the disk.

Re:the BSOD screensaver

[clone53421]

That's nothing. I made the "You may be a victim of software counterfeiting" screen my wallpaper.

A long time ago...

[fahrbot-bot]

I got something like this from the Csh on a 4.3BSD system. Still makes me laugh:

Assertion Botched: This can't happen.

My Favorite

[azadrozny]

Some time ago I was running a batch job and the system returned the message, "The system is unwilling to process your request." I figured it was tired of running my programs, and wanted to quit for the day.

WebTV Anecdote "The Wrong Error Message"

[Burning1]

The following story comes from Andy McFadden:

The wrong error message

In the late hours of September 17th, 1996, the day before the WebTV service was scheduled to go online, a group of us (Rick Daley, Lennart LÃvstrand, me (Andy McFadden), probably Arnold de Leon, plus several others I can't remember) had gathered in the operations center in 275 Alma St., Palo Alto. A collection of network operations and service software engineers were hanging around to bear witness to the official launch of WebTV.

When the fated hour struck, one of the netops folks, Bryce Jasmer, started to go through the registration process with his WebTV box. As with any online service, we figured the good names would go quickly, so it was important to get in and register before The Masses signed up. Besides, there was something nifty about being one of the first people to ever sign up on the "real" service. Until this day, all accounts were "disposable" test accounts.

A few of us were standing around, watching him type, feeling giddy with anticipation and lack of sleep. He'd entered his name, address, and other personal information, and was typing in his user name. This is the name used as the e-mail address. He typed in "jazz", so his e-mail would be "jazz@webtv.net". When he hit "enter" on the wireless keyboard, we heard the "whoom" sound that meant an error dialog was coming up. All eyes turned to the screen.

---

To understand what happened next, it's important to understand a little something about how the service worked. WebTV was meant to be a family-oriented service, so it was important to screen all user names and other externally visible features for profanity. It's impossible to catch everything, but it's not hard to catch obvious things.

The user names were compared against a set of regular expressions. Regular expressions allow you to match against a pattern. For example, "fu.*bar" would match against all names starting with "fu" and ending with "bar". With carefully-chosen patterns, you can catch and reject blatant instances while accepting words like "shitake" and "matsushita" that have a profane word embedded within them.

The same mechanism was also used to prevent users from selecting "forbidden" names, such as "postmaster", "root", "admin", and "help". We had a text file that looked like this:

admin.*
User names may not start with "admin".
postmaster
You're not the postmaster.
poop
That's a bad word.
weenie
That's a bad word.

An entry had two lines. The first was the regular expression to match, the second was the error message that would be displayed to the user. The service code read the file, grabbing two lines at a time, and when a user name was entered it compared the name against every regular expression. An error dialog was displayed for the first one that matched. If nothing matched, the user name was accepted.

The code that read the file knew how to skip over comments. It did not, however, give any special treatment to blank lines.

---

Someone had made some changes to the file with the profanity expressions, and while doing so had added a single blank line after the end of the "reserved" names and before the start of the profane words. When the code read the filter list, it grabbed the blank line as the regular expression, and the word that followed as the error message. As luck would have it, a blank-line regular expression matched anything.

It's midnight. We're all a little punchy. Bryce types in a user name, and the box responds with a very simple message (click here to view).

We start laughing hysterically.

The Mac Programming Works C Compiler...

[Dr. Manhattan]

...had the best error messages.

"...And the lord said, `lo, there shall only be case or default labels inside a switch statement'"

"a typedef name was a complete surprise to me at this point in your program"

"`Volatile' and `Register' are not miscible"

"This struct already has a perfectly good definition"

"Symbol table full - fatal heap error; please go buy a RAM upgrade from your local Apple dealer"

"type in (cast) must be scalar; ANSI 3.3.4; page 39, lines 10-11 (I know you don't care, I'm just trying to annoy you)"

...and more.

ed -- the question mark!

[morgan_greywolf]

$ ed
help
?
list
?
quit
?
bye
?
die
?
FSCK OFF and DIE you fscking BASTARD!!!
?
^C

Re:ed -- the question mark!

[Eudial]

$ ed
help
?
list
?
quit
?
bye
?
die
?
FSCK OFF and DIE you fscking BASTARD!!!
?
^C

Actually, substitute the ?s for loud beeps and strange letters flooding the screen, and you've got vi.

It's a great idiot proof tool for making. If you don't care about security, but don't want dangerously unsavvy people to get at the guest account or whatever, just start up vi in the console as you leave the computer, and only those that can prove themselves worthy against the mighty dragon that is vi shall pass.

Re:ed -- the question mark!

[clone53421]

Hrumph. That's nothing compared to writing a program that takes 7 1/2 million years to run and then the answer is "42".

Reply Hazy, Ask Again

[2short]

Back in the DOS days, I once used a hex editor to find the string "Bad Command or Filename" and replace it with "Reply Hazy, Ask Again". That was fun, but when my coworker got that machine in a reshuffle, she was confused. I explained what I had done, but she couldn't get her brain around the idea that that error was just a string of characters on the disk; that it didn't mean anything different. So she kept asking me about it until she got a new machine along with her promotion to head of tech support. Wow, that job sucked.

Re:The Daily WTF

[Emperor Zombie]

Some are absolute genius!

You just missed a perfect opportunity to say they were brillant.

Re:Talk about a missed opportunity- Printer on fir

[uxr]

PC LOAD LETTER

What the fuck does that mean?

Re:PC LOAD LETTER

[Norwell Bob]

PC LOAD LETTER... what the FUCK DOES THAT MEAN?!?!

Re:The most honest Windows error message

[amck]

Yep. A Slightly better phrasing I've seen, every time our old Windows Exchange 4.0 box came up"

Warning: An unexpected condition occured:
Exchange started successfully.

As explained, its a race condition calling GetLastError().

Worse than failure

[DragonHawk]

Actually, I've had "ERROR: No error" before.

I've seen the following in the Windows "Event Viewer" logs. (Reproduced from memory, so it's not verbatim, but it's pretty close.)

The following problem occurred during installation of Microsoft Office 2003:
Success

(Apparently, when installing via GPO, MSI sometimes reports an error despite everything being okay. So the message gets logged. It can happen with any package. I just liked the double entendre from when it happened to Office.)

(BTW, the subject line comes from this essay. If you haven't read it, you should. What's worse than failure? Success. HHOS.)

Psychoanalyze me...

[refactored]

I once wrote an "Eliza" like program in Basic....

When I spotted a bug in the output I typed...
list 1000-4000
and my program responded...
Really? Why?
Totally derailed my train of thought.