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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.
Error, Windows Vista detected on Drive C: prepare to acknowledge, confirm and reboot.
www.thedailywtf.com has a great selection of error messages. Some are absolute genius!
FIVE
missing /etc/passwd, tried to login as root:
"you don't exist. go away."
Surely "Keyboard Error: Press Any Key To Continue" should have been in there somewhere?
Username or password invalid. It's probably got the most face time...
Kernel Panic? Why not just teach that damned kernel some self-defense lessons. Or, at least tell it to grow a set of balls. Just stop the damned Panic.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
Somehow, spreading an article across many, many ad-ridden pages is not considered an error.
SYNTAX ERROR
:^)
That's all I ever got out of one when I'd play around with them at Sears back in the day.
Error, Water Detected in Drive C:
"Congratulations, your Lotus Notes installation is complete."
Having recieved many of these errors in the past, I can't help but point out there is very little that I would consider "Great" about them.
+++ Divide By Cucumber Error. Please Reinstall Universe And Reboot +++
The page cannot be found The page you are looking for might have been removed, had its name changed, or is temporarily unavailable. ___ Please try the following: If you typed the page address in the Address bar, make sure that it is spelled correctly. Open the asdf.com home page, and then look for links to the information you want. Click the Back button to try another link. Click Search to look for information on the Internet. HTTP 404 - File not found Internet Explorer
I just run the "BSOD" screensaver on my linux machine, with all error messages enabled. I love having people come in, pause, say, "Um... looks like your machine is really screwed up". Then I bump the machine out of screensaver mode, and their jaws drop.
It wasn't. It is in the article.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
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
I did the write-in option:
"Aiee penguin on the SCSI-bus."
That's the only time I've thrown back my head and laughed when debugging a crash. I can understand how "lp0 on fire" won out for historical significance, though.
"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
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Some time ago I was running a batch job and the system returned the message, "The system is unwilling to process your request." I figured it was tired of running my programs, and wanted to quit for the day.
The following story comes from Andy McFadden:
This should of been on the list.
"Segmentation fault (core dumped)", :-)
"Parity Error"
and of course "With what? Your bare hands?"
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...
I don't read replies by ACs.
"Few users will like an error message no matter how well it is designed."
--Roger S. Pressman, _Software Engineering: A Practitioner's Approach_
The article cites Wikipedia in claiming that the Sad Mac dates from 1987, not 1984. Nope; it's 1984. Just hit the interrupt button on the programmer's switch and you got a sad mac (000F 000D, if I remember correctly -- 2 groups of 4 hex digits for the 68000-based machines). Of course, that's from personal experience so Wikipedia: No Original Research means I can't correct the erroneous Wikipedia page. And then some idiot bot is wanting to remove the "bomb" image from the wiki article because of copyright issues....
Someone else removed the 1987 date, but the 1984 date still isn't there.
"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
"Windows needs your permission to continue"
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.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
cat << EOF > foo.c
long long long foo;
int main () {}
EOF
$ gcc foo.c -o foo
foo.c:1: error: 'long long long' is too long for GCC
TRS-80 level 1 basic was a joy.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
"...And the lord said, `lo, there shall only be case or default labels inside a switch statement'"
"a typedef name was a complete surprise to me at this point in your program"
"`Volatile' and `Register' are not miscible"
"This struct already has a perfectly good definition"
"Symbol table full - fatal heap error; please go buy a RAM upgrade from your local Apple dealer"
"type in (cast) must be scalar; ANSI 3.3.4; page 39, lines 10-11 (I know you don't care, I'm just trying to annoy you)"
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
$ ed
help
?
list
?
quit
?
bye
?
die
?
FSCK OFF and DIE you fscking BASTARD!!!
?
^C
My blog
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?
Back in the DOS days, I once used a hex editor to find the string "Bad Command or Filename" and replace it with "Reply Hazy, Ask Again". That was fun, but when my coworker got that machine in a reshuffle, she was confused. I explained what I had done, but she couldn't get her brain around the idea that that error was just a string of characters on the disk; that it didn't mean anything different. So she kept asking me about it until she got a new machine along with her promotion to head of tech support. Wow, that job sucked.
2001 is one of my all-time favorite movies.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
I think everyone remembers their first segmentation fault or core dump.
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!
They missed this one:
"Too many pages on the article."
factor 966971: 966971
PC LOAD LETTER
What the fuck does that mean?
"Aieee, killing interrupt handler" (Linux kernel)
PS, hey, I still have Excellent karma... why no bonus? Now I'm, like, nobody!
I didn't see the most classic: Excuse me, but there's a moth caught in one of my relays.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
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.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
I like the Fail Whale, but I think that rather than being accompanied by birds, he should have the company of just a bowl of petunias.
Much more fitting.
(...tip of the hat to DNA.)
eleven plus two / twelve plus one
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."
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
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.
That was it. Nothing else. Couldn't even bother to spell the word properly. It meant that somewhere in your 10,000 cards(!) of Fortran there was an error. Over time I learned what to look for when this happened.
We were real programmers then. Didn't have these girly compilers that tell you exactly what and where the problem is.
"Cannot delete filename: there is not enough disk space
Delete one or more files to free disk space, and then try again
This happens when you try and delete (as in move to the recycle bin) a file on a disk that's almost full, probably due to the extra space needed to store where the file was deleted from
Exigo spamos et dona ferentes
See KB276304
Your system has been halted in order to prevent a loss of data.
Ummm, shouldn't that read "Your system has been halted in order to guarantee a loss of data"?, since I was never given a chance to save anything before the system halt.
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
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.")
I liked "lp0: on fire". I wonder what other things they could extend this too?
"Dell0: on fire."
"iPod0: on fire."
"TheRoof0, TheRoof0, TheRoof0: on fire."
"Heart2: on fire."
Check out my sci-fi book "Lacuna" at http://goo.gl/MVxX8
Is this some sort of trap...?
ERROR: No keyboard found. Hit F1 to continue.
(No, I'm not kidding.)
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.
From IBM's OS/2 tokenring network driver. "Open error during physical insertion phase". Ouch!
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.
For those who just want the lame list:
And in refernce to the summary:
UTF-8: There and Back Again
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
My favorite ever I found by doing a hex dump of a Tandy computer. I don't think many users saw this message. It said:
ERROR 0: POWER NOT ON
My second favorite came from a General Electric time sharing computer. It was:
EVIL DO LOOP
A close relative of the common '404 page not found' error, 418 I'm a Teapot is the response specified in the RFC 2324 - Hypertext Coffee Pot Control Protocol (HTCPCP).
Any attempt to brew coffee with a teapot should result in the error code "418 I'm a teapot". The resulting entity body MAY be short and stout.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
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
Does no one remember the haikus of BeOS?
Computers allow humans to make mistakes at the fastest speeds known, with the possible exception of tequila and handguns
Happened to a friend of mine while installing Ubuntu (IIRC):
http://img241.imageshack.us/img241/2758/dsc00035ca8.jpg
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!
PC LOAD LETTER
What the fuck does that mean?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC_Load_Letter
The other night John Connor is swimming in the Pacific off Santa Monica Pier after jumping in to evade Terminator Cromartie, who proceeded to jump in after him and try to drown him. After escaping, John looks up and sees his protector Terminator Cameron (now subsequently referred to as "The Caminator") peering down at him.
He says, "A little help?"
The Caminator says, "I can't swim."
He says, "I just figured that out."
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
My favorite error message has probably never been seen by any other Slashdotter...
I worked on the FCS MK88/2 (Trident-I Backfit fire control) in the Navy - a room sized collection of computers, old fashioned hard drives the size of footlockers, and associated electronics. In normal operation is was medium noisy what with the disk drives clattering, dozen of power supplies humming (including two big 2kw 120VAC to 28VDC converters), the printer occasionally printing a status or system report, and sometimes a switch rolling as the system operated. It also looked somewhat like you'd think a computer looked like if all you had to go on was Hollywood... Though the lights didn't blink (except for one set on the MDF's), there were a couple of hundred indicator lights scattered across the system plus the console had a couple of dozen more usually lit.
One day, cruising along at [mumble] feet under the North Atlantic, the generator that provided power to the system ate itself... In an instant all that humming stopped and all the lights went dark.
Except one.
On the alarm and monitoring portion of the console (powered by a separate supply) one red light came on, the only light lit and the only portion of the whole massive pile of machinery that had power...
"Input Power Fault".
Well, duh...
My favourite error message is when the Linux kernel encounters an NMI error (can be due to bad memory) on boot:
"Dazed and confused, but trying to continue"
There use to be something about bad chips in the messages about 10 years ago when I encountered it, but the error messages have been changed in the kernel since then.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Actually, I've had "ERROR: No error" before.
I've seen the following in the Windows "Event Viewer" logs. (Reproduced from memory, so it's not verbatim, but it's pretty close.)
The following problem occurred during installation of Microsoft Office 2003:
Success
(Apparently, when installing via GPO, MSI sometimes reports an error despite everything being okay. So the message gets logged. It can happen with any package. I just liked the double entendre from when it happened to Office.)
(BTW, the subject line comes from this essay. If you haven't read it, you should. What's worse than failure? Success. HHOS.)
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
I recall using a JOVIAL compiler in the 1980s. My favorite message was:
COMPILE COMPLETE: NONE OF THE ERRORS WERE DETECTED.
I once heard tell of a Pascal compiler that could produce the error message:
You lied to me when you told me this was a program.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
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.
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*...
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
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.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
When I spotted a bug in the output I typed...
list 1000-4000
and my program responded...
Really? Why?
Totally derailed my train of thought.
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.
A catch-all error message I saw once on a Solaris box (7 I think) read:
"Something is broken - Fix something"
It was well and truly borked - only time in my Unix admin career that I resorted to a re-install!
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.
The summary reminded me that back in 1991, I got from mail-order a piece of shareware called Jazzbench that was designed to be a cooler alternative to the official Amiga Workbench. The first time I ran the software was at night, in my basement, and my speakers were turned up loud. When I attempted to do something stupid (probably about 10 seconds in), the software blared out its standard error message: a sample of "I'm sorry, Dave - I'm afraid I can't do that" from Kubrick's 2001. My name is Dave, and as this was before I had even heard about the film, let alone seen it, it scared the **** out of me. So it gets my vote for the greatest error message of all time...