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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.
The Mac, having 4-channel wave sound from the beginning, went one better than the PC when it came to the startup failure beep. While the PC would beep out some sequence of single notes indicating hardware errors, the Mac would simply play one chord. A successful bootup was a pleasant chime (sometimes heard on Futurama or other shows when something boots up). However, hardware errors not only produced the sad mac, but a discordant anti-chime. For those with good ears, it was sometimes possible to diagnose some errors by the particular musical dissonance. In particular, some familiar with upgrading the Mac Plus became familiar with a chord indicating bad RAM.
Good times.
E pluribus unum
"A system call that should never fail has failed."
A customer read that to me over the phone once. I made him confirm the wording twice to make sure.
Yeah, its a legit error message too - not a malware scare tactic to get a user to click yes, which I had half expected.
I just like the wording. 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.
Kevin
One day I got a call from engineering that told me they where getting a error in a vb application. When I get
there to have a look they told me the engineer that wrote the code had unfortunately died the day before at a
fairly young age of a hear attack. The error showing was, "Beware The Man Behind The Curtain"...talk about creepy..
Got Code?
I happen to have an Amiga Joyboard and a copy of Mogul Mania. Anyone know how much weight this thing can handle?
I'd like to try it out, but I don't know if this thing can handle 180lbs of adult male.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I'll bet you'll like the Re-Pagination firefox extension. When you get to the bottom of the first
page, do a right click on the "2" or the word "next" in that list of pages. Then you just scroll
down and see all the pages without clicking on anything more. The extension fetches the pages and
appends them to the bottom. I consider it "jerking the reader around" when sites have lists like that,
and thwarting them always provides a nice feeling of satisfaction and triumph!
Hide all sigs: Click HELP+Prefs (top), VIEWING (last on right), DISABLE SIGS (3rd on left) and SAVE (hidden at bottom).
Old timers will recognize "360" not as a MSFT game machine but arguably the most financially successful operating system - the IBM mainframe. ABEND is short for "Abnormal end". If had a line printer on your computer you'd get a print of the ENTIRE contents of registers and core memory. From the Program Instruction Address register you figure out which memory instruction you executing and the registers and core memory contents it was operating on. It was straightforward debugging, but tedious. As core memory reached 16K or 64K bytes, many forests worth of printouts were sacrificed in the name of poor programming.
See KB276304
I do. :)
There was this crazy guy I knew in college, who went to work for Microsoft. We'd drifted apart, though we both still lurk in some private email groups of friends from that timeframe. About 5 years ago, I saw his name in a Newsweek article about some crazy-hip new MS project, calling him "a relative codger" at 33, brought in to rein in the young guns on the project. The official Microsoft web page for the project featured a "meet the team" section, which next to him, included the phrase "Wrote the BSOD."
I couldn't let that lie, so I wrote him a quick note asking if it was true, was he proud of it, and most importantly, "Why blue?" Here's part of the response:
I chose white on blue because that was the same color that the firmware on the Mips workstations we had used for their boot selection screen. Plus that was the default for the old character mode SlickEdit code editor that most of the devs used.
and:
No, it is not something I am particularly proud of, but once the kids I work with found out about this little skeleton in my closet they never let me forget it.
(He also avows responsibility for the Win 9x blue screen, "which gets a lot more air time.")
And I've had "ERROR: Too many errors!"
Was a compile-time error generated by Borland Turbo C++ 3.0 if you had too many syntax errors. Ah, high school...
Draining water from Drive A:
Drive A: on spin cycle. Please wait.
(at which point it would turn on the drive and make a whirring noise through the PC's speaker).
I believe this little ditty was called "spinrite.com". I remember it fondly. It came out before the days of ubiquitous hard-drives (so no drive C yet). Most everyone still used 5.25" floppies.
I was a serious bit flogger before the days of windows. I used to go into the dos directory and hack the Abort Retry Ignor command so that it looked like latin(Abo Ret Igno). It was also a way to determine if people had been messing with my installs because that was a file that was always overwritten during patch application or reinstalls.
When I did a software engineering course we were using prolog. Nothing like writing a two page prolog program(for non prolog people two pages is pretty big), running it and having the result of "no"(or worse still... expecting output and getting "yes"... yes? yes what you pile of crap?). Going thru a prolog debugger is an exercisse in insanity as well.
My favorite isn't really a message, but a device. I used to work with some old Univac computers that were originally designed to be installed on Navy ships for an integrated fire-control system (NTDS). Whenever the computer crashed, it would set off the fault horn, at about 150 dB SPL. It was guaranteed to wake up anyone inside the building and give the computer operator a heart attack. It also had a "battle short" switch that disabled all safety features.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
BSOD's produce countless variations of error messages (some software, some hardware), so shouldn't they be viewed as a vehicle for error messages, rather than error messages themselves?
It's like saying an ocean is my favorite type of animal, as opposed to a dolphin.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
For those who don't know/remember/weren't born - In IBM's infinite wisdom, I guess they decided to draw pictures in some sort of crappy BIOS low-res graphics to describe the error messages - probibly because anyone dumb enough to buy a PS/2 were to stupid to know how to read.
For example - I was working as an intern my freshman year of college, and had to set up a bunch of machines (or somehting) including PS/2's.
Now I mind you, I was actually quite computer litterate - so imagine my surprise when I turned on one system and got a picture which I could only describe as late-20th-century hieroglyphics. It had a person - with horizontal dotted lines coming out of its head, going through a rectangle or square or something - then a bunch of numbers.
WTF?!
I probably spent 10 minutes trying my best to decipher. The best I could come up with, was that it wanted me to elevate the monitor to be level with my head - probibly to avoid some sort of repetitive-strain-injury or something.
Was there some sort of water-leveling device running between the computer and monitor through the VGA cable or something?! How did it know this?! Even I knew this was stupid - but was desparate to try something. No - that wasn't it!
Eventually, I figured out the message: "Look up this error code in the manual".
If they just said that, I would have done that! If that hadn't showed anything but an error number, I would have done that!
Excel used to have an error that read "Error: Not Enough" and the dialog box had only an "Ok" button.
I always preferred old-school X programs, which tended to label the button in error dialogs "Dismiss". As in, dismiss the error message. Clicking "OK" in response to an error just seems so... wrong. Back in 1995, I was playing around with the then-new Windows 95. I monkeyed with the SHELL setting, and the following error message appeared on restart:
Could not start Explorer. You must reinstall Windows.
[ OK ]
I refused to click the OK button. That was not okay. (I instead hit the RESET hardware switch. The bad SHELL setting was easily fixed by editing WIN.INI from DOS mode.)
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
I have to say, this is by far my favorite 404.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
OK, I'm dating (and placing) myself with this one... But I honestly think that no list of error messages should omit the scourge of ZX Spectrum users. Ah, the joys of fiddling with volume, treble and head alignment.