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

Where's the keyboard error?

[Kentaree]

Surely "Keyboard Error: Press Any Key To Continue" should have been in there somewhere?

Re:Where's the keyboard error?

[overtly_demure]

To my mind, this is by far the best error message of all time. It is succinct, specific, easy to understand, and utterly absurd, all at the same time.

Missing Option

[dintech]

Username or password invalid. It's probably got the most face time...

Commodore 64...

[Norwell Bob]

SYNTAX ERROR

That's all I ever got out of one when I'd play around with them at Sears back in the day. :^)

PC LOAD LETTER

[f0dder]

This should of been on the list.

Re:Talk about a missed opportunity- Printer on fir

[nbert]

In similar vein: PC LOAD LETTER

Btw: Of course they didn't modify this message for countries which don't use the Letter format, making it even more confusing...

And on the flipside:

[omarius]

"Few users will like an error message no matter how well it is designed."
      --Roger S. Pressman, _Software Engineering: A Practitioner's Approach_

Re:Quite a good read.

[gnick]

I've never run into the FailWhale, because I've never tried Twitter. Although I'm confused by TFA's comment:

If you can explain what the image has to do with a Web 2.0 service buckling under extreme traffic, please let me know.

8 little birds trying to carry a whale they have tethered seems like a perfectly appropriate image to accompany a server strain error IMO.

The message from HAL9000

[treeves]

"I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that" isn't quite an error message. It might be called a bug, since it was an unexpected consequence of HAL's gaining his own volition, although even that is arguable. It may be considered a natural extension of HAL's programming aimed at protecting the mission. But it certainly wasn't a canned response to an internal error.

2001 is one of my all-time favorite movies.

Unix

[Quiet_Desperation]

I think everyone remembers their first segmentation fault or core dump.

abort, retry, ignore

[syrinx]

They mention Abort, Retry, Fail as somehow more memorable than the original Abort, Retry, Ignore, which I'd disagree with.

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

Re:A system call that should never fail has failed

[element-o.p.]

The fact that you bothered to include this error implies to me that you knew there was a chance that the system call could fail.

Maybe. Or maybe the programmer was just really anal retentive, like me.

I don't really consider myself a programmer, but I do write a fair share of CGI scripts. In my scripts, I detaint the user inputs and provide appropriate error codes for user inputs that fail the detaint. The error trapping almost always leads to one (or more) of some finite set of possibilities, but I *always* include a catch-all along the lines of...
1) Didn't match valid input;
2) Didn't match expected error #1;
...
n) Didn't match expected error #n;
n+1) Catch-all (just on the off chance that I failed to account for a possible error).

For the catch-all case, I include an error message similar to "This error message shouldn't be possible. Please send an e-mail to tell me how you got here."

Re:Sad Mac and Startup Beep

[prockcore]

Having obnoxious sound clips attached to every event you can think of was the epitome of the early 90s.

"Game over man, game over!"

Re:UNIX: Please contact your system administrator

[LinuxDon]

Isn't it Windows that's often doing that? Crapping out with the most vague error message you can possibly imagine and ending in: 'Please contact your system administrator'

Luckily, as a system administrator you have the ability to look right through the computer case and into the RAM modules to see exactly what has gone wrong in this particular case. Otherwise this kind of error message could just blow your day.

Re:"Nobody knows why it's blue..."

[xtracto]

aaah

and THIS is the value of reading the comments in slashdot.

Thanks!