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

The Daily WTF

[mini_razor]

www.thedailywtf.com has a great selection of error messages. Some are absolute genius!

The most honest Windows error message

[AliasMarlowe]

"Error: The operation completed successfully"
I kid you not. This one was repeatable on any windows box whenever Dr.Watson was invoked after a program crashed. It appeared in win 3.0, 3.1, 3.11, 95, 98, NT, 2000 (don't know about win me, xp or vista). Just click the "save as" button for the error log, then click cancel. Then the magic error appeared in its own box:
"Error: The operation completed successfully"
Dr.Watson terminated as well, of course.

Re:The most honest Windows error message

[Anonymous Coward]

That's what you get when you just translate the return value of GetLastError() into a string using the appropriate Winapi function, given that the last command actually was successful.

Re:and the fourteenth error should be...

[gnick]

That's probably why TFS questions "I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that" being left out.

Curiosly, though, TFA does say (on page 3 of 5):

I chose to limit myself to one fictional error message in this list, but I could go on: If I ever produce a sequel to this story, I guarantee you that "I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that" will be on it.

Perhaps Technologizer got tired of clicking through TFA before reaching #5.

Re:The error no one wishes to hear.

[Negatyfus]

My gods, I remember that little DOS prank, complete with simulated water sounds coming out of the system speaker! That must've been about 20 years ago.

TCFA

[halcyon1234]

For those who just want the lame list:

1. Abort, Retry, Fail? (MS-DOS)
2. Guru Meditation (Commodore Amiga)
3. The Red Screen of Death (Windows)
4. Power On Self-Test Beep (PCs)
5. FailWhale (Twitter)
6. lp0 on fire (Unix)
7. Kernel Panic (Unix/Macintosh)
8. Windows Must Restart Because the Remote Procedure Call (RPC)
9. Service Terminated Unexpectedly (Windows)
10. Does Not Compute (Lost in Space, etc.)
11. The Red Ring of Death (Xbox 360)
12. Sad Mac (Macintosh)
13. 404 File Not Found (Web)
14. The Blue Screen of Death (Windows)

And in refernce to the summary:

I chose to limit myself to one fictional error message in this list, but I could go on: If I ever produce a sequel to this story, I guarantee you that "I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that" will be on it,

POST error codes

[DragonHawk]

To be fair, it should had said "Error: keyboard not found. Connect a keyboard and press F1 to continue." But then, each byte of ROM was expensive once.

That error message dates back to the early days of the IBM-PC (possibly the first model, although I couldn't swear to that). Every expected possible failure during POST (Power On Self Test) had a corresponding error code and message. They all used the same output routine, which displayed the error code, the error message, and prompted the operator to press [F1] to continue. They simply didn't create a special case for keyboard errors -- it displayed the same way all the others did. There were other errors which left the system effectively inoperable, but still prompted to press F1. The keyboard error was just the most commonly encountered, of course.

It was error code 301, by the way. :)

IBM-PC keyboard hot swap

[DragonHawk]

the error pre-dates PS/2 keyboards, and the older keyboards with the larger connectors were hot-swappable

The IBM-PC and PS/2 keyboard interfaces were not designed to be hot-swappable. However, it tended to work anyway, provided POST completed initialization of the i8042 first. On occasion, though, a cheap clone would have a mobo that fried the keyboard controller if you tried to hot-swap it. Back in those days, new motherboards were *expensive*...

Explaining ARF

[DragonHawk]

I seem to remember a few times getting all four: Abort, Retry, Ignore, Fail. Ah, DOS.

Yah. ARF came from the DOS "critical error" handler. Problems that required operator intervention were termed "critical errors", since the system could not proceed without help. When a BIOS or DOS system routine encountered such a problem, they invoked a software interrupt. The theory was that a good program could hook the interrupt and put in a more useful error handler. Obviously, not many programs did so.

Abort killed the running program or command, and returned you to the DOS prompt. Retry had DOS try again, without returning control to the caller. Ignore meant control was returned to the calling routine, as if nothing had gone wrong. Fail meant control was returned to the running routine, with an error status indication.

"Fail" might seem like a good idea, but it turns out that a lot of code didn't check the error status, leading to erratic behavior and/or just calling the same routine again.

There was some rhyme or reason to when which choices were displayed when, but I've long since forgotten it. Some of it might have had something to do with some commands being internal to COMMAND.COM and some being external programs, but the service routines all invoking the same "critical error" software interrupt.