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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'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).
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.")