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The Thirteen Greatest Error Messages of All Time

Posted by samzenpus on from the let-them-down-easy dept.

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.

5 of 623 comments (clear)

  1. The Daily WTF by mini_razor · · Score: 5, Informative

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

  2. The most honest Windows error message by AliasMarlowe · · Score: 5, Informative

    "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.

    --
    Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
    1. Re:The most honest Windows error message by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

  3. Re:The error no one wishes to hear. by Negatyfus · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  4. POST error codes by DragonHawk · · Score: 5, Informative

    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. :)

    --

    dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
    I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.