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.

and the fourteenth error should be...

[houbou (1097327)]

Error, Windows Vista detected on Drive C: prepare to acknowledge, confirm and reboot.

Kernel Panic!!!

[WED Fan (911325)]

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.

Re:Kernel Panic!!!

[nbert (785663)]

cd /usr/src/linux && egrep -ir "( fuck)|( shit)" *

Technically most are not error messages, but they are quite interesting.

One I'm missing in the list is "Too many colors". Some very old windows programs refused to work when gfx was set to more than 256 colors.

Re:Kernel Panic!!!

[Malevolyn (776946)]

Actually, I've had "ERROR: No error" before. I'm going to have to say that's much more frustrating, especially when it prevents the program from continuing.

Re:Kernel Panic!!!

[Daniel Dvorkin (106857)]

It's not Panic's fault. He's only following the orders of General Protection Fault.

The most honest Windows error message

[AliasMarlowe (1042386)]

"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.

Re:The most honest Windows error message

[by Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:The most honest Windows error message

[amck (34780)]

Yep. A Slightly better phrasing I've seen, every time our old Windows Exchange 4.0 box came up"

Warning: An unexpected condition occured:
Exchange started successfully.

As explained, its a race condition calling GetLastError().

Re:and the fourteenth error should be...

[doti (966971)]

Who is General Failure, and why is he reading my hard drive?

Re:and the fourteenth error should be...

[gnick (1211984)]

That's probably why TFS questions "I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that" being left out.

Curiosly, though, TFA does say (on page 3 of 5):

I chose to limit myself to one fictional error message in this list, but I could go on: If I ever produce a sequel to this story, I guarantee you that "I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that" will be on it.

Perhaps Technologizer got tired of clicking through TFA before reaching #5.

The Daily WTF

[mini_razor (1306073)]

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

go away.

[thhamm (764787)]

missing /etc/passwd, tried to login as root:
"you don't exist. go away."

Where's the keyboard error?

[Kentaree (1078787)]

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

Re:Where's the keyboard error?

[overtly_demure (1024363)]

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 (998802)]

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

Your site is padded with ads. Continue?

[by Anonymous Coward]

Somehow, spreading an article across many, many ad-ridden pages is not considered an error.

Re:Your site is padded with ads. Continue?

[ThinkTwicePostOnce (1001392)]

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!

Commodore 64...

[Norwell Bob (982405)]

SYNTAX ERROR

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

ed -- the question mark!

[morgan_greywolf (835522)]

$ ed
help
?
list
?
quit
?
bye
?
die
?
FSCK OFF and DIE you fscking BASTARD!!!
?
^C

Re:ed -- the question mark!

[Eudial (590661)]

$ ed
help
?
list
?
quit
?
bye
?
die
?
FSCK OFF and DIE you fscking BASTARD!!!
?
^C

Actually, substitute the ?s for loud beeps and strange letters flooding the screen, and you've got vi.

It's a great idiot proof tool for making. If you don't care about security, but don't want dangerously unsavvy people to get at the guest account or whatever, just start up vi in the console as you leave the computer, and only those that can prove themselves worthy against the mighty dragon that is vi shall pass.

Re:ed -- the question mark!

[clone53421 (1310749)]

Hrumph. That's nothing compared to writing a program that takes 7 1/2 million years to run and then the answer is "42".

The error no one wishes to hear.

[houbou (1097327)]

Error, Water Detected in Drive C:

Re:The error no one wishes to hear.

[Negatyfus (602326)]

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.

They missed it:

[LibertineR (591918)]

"Congratulations, your Lotus Notes installation is complete."

Divide by cucumber error

[reydelamirienda (892327)]

+++ Divide By Cucumber Error. Please Reinstall Universe And Reboot +++

Re:Divide by cucumber error

[LordEd (840443)]

++?????++ Out of Cheese Error. Redo From Start.

the BSOD screensaver

[gardyloo (512791)]

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.

Re:the BSOD screensaver

[snspdaarf (1314399)]

We had a guy do that at my office. The boss comes in, sees the BSOD, decides to help out, flips the big red switch on the PC. Hosed the boot sector on the disk.

Re:the BSOD screensaver

[clone53421 (1310749)]

That's nothing. I made the "You may be a victim of software counterfeiting" screen [msdn.com] my wallpaper.

Sad Mac and Startup Beep

[samkass (174571)]

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.

Re:Sad Mac and Startup Beep

[Altus (1034)]

I liked the early powerpc macs that made the sound of a car crash when the failed to boot.

The Mac Programming Works C Compiler...

[Dr. Manhattan (29720)]

...had the best error messages [ralentz.com].

"...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)"

...and more.

Re:Sad Mac and Startup Beep

[prockcore (543967)]

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

"Game over man, game over!"

A long time ago...

[fahrbot-bot (874524)]

I got something like this from the Csh on a 4.3BSD system. Still makes me laugh:

Assertion Botched: This can't happen.

My Favorite

[azadrozny (576352)]

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.

WebTV Anecdote "The Wrong Error Message"

[Burning1 (204959)]

The following story comes from Andy McFadden [fadden.com]:

The wrong error message

In the late hours of September 17th, 1996, the day before the WebTV service was scheduled to go online, a group of us (Rick Daley, Lennart LÃvstrand, me (Andy McFadden), probably Arnold de Leon, plus several others I can't remember) had gathered in the operations center in 275 Alma St., Palo Alto. A collection of network operations and service software engineers were hanging around to bear witness to the official launch of WebTV.

When the fated hour struck, one of the netops folks, Bryce Jasmer, started to go through the registration process with his WebTV box. As with any online service, we figured the good names would go quickly, so it was important to get in and register before The Masses signed up. Besides, there was something nifty about being one of the first people to ever sign up on the "real" service. Until this day, all accounts were "disposable" test accounts.

A few of us were standing around, watching him type, feeling giddy with anticipation and lack of sleep. He'd entered his name, address, and other personal information, and was typing in his user name. This is the name used as the e-mail address. He typed in "jazz", so his e-mail would be "[e-mail]". When he hit "enter" on the wireless keyboard, we heard the "whoom" sound that meant an error dialog was coming up. All eyes turned to the screen.

---

To understand what happened next, it's important to understand a little something about how the service worked. WebTV was meant to be a family-oriented service, so it was important to screen all user names and other externally visible features for profanity. It's impossible to catch everything, but it's not hard to catch obvious things.

The user names were compared against a set of regular expressions. Regular expressions allow you to match against a pattern. For example, "fu.*bar" would match against all names starting with "fu" and ending with "bar". With carefully-chosen patterns, you can catch and reject blatant instances while accepting words like "shitake" and "matsushita" that have a profane word embedded within them.

The same mechanism was also used to prevent users from selecting "forbidden" names, such as "postmaster", "root", "admin", and "help". We had a text file that looked like this:

admin.*
User names may not start with "admin".
postmaster
You're not the postmaster.
poop
That's a bad word.
weenie
That's a bad word.

An entry had two lines. The first was the regular expression to match, the second was the error message that would be displayed to the user. The service code read the file, grabbing two lines at a time, and when a user name was entered it compared the name against every regular expression. An error dialog was displayed for the first one that matched. If nothing matched, the user name was accepted.

The code that read the file knew how to skip over comments. It did not, however, give any special treatment to blank lines.

---

Someone had made some changes to the file with the profanity expressions, and while doing so had added a single blank line after the end of the "reserved" names and before the start of the profane words. When the code read the filter list, it grabbed the blank line as the regular expression, and the word that followed as the error message. As luck would have it, a blank-line regular expression matched anything.

It's midnight. We're all a little punchy. Bryce types in a user name, and the box responds with a very simple message (click here to view [fadden.com]).

We start laughing hysterically.

PC LOAD LETTER

[f0dder (570496)]

This should of been on the list.

Re:PC LOAD LETTER

[Norwell Bob (982405)]

PC LOAD LETTER... what the FUCK DOES THAT MEAN?!?!

And on the flipside:

[omarius (52253)]

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

Beware

[codepunk (167897)]

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..

   

Re:Beware

[Amazing Quantum Man (458715)]

Back in '84 at UC Santa Cruz, we had to write an 8086 assembler and linker. I was on the linker group, and we decided to create the 8086 BAT-Linker.

Error messages were a short dialog along the lines of:

Holy $SOMETHING, Batman! $ERROR_CONDITION occurred!
Right! Quick, Robin! To the BAT-Debugger!
But Batman, we don't have a BAT-Debugger!
Even so, Robin, fatal errors are no excuse for poor traffic safety.
Gosh, Batman, you're right! I never thought of that!

Reply Hazy, Ask Again

[2short (466733)]

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.

The message from HAL9000

[treeves (963993)]

"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.

How about....

[ConstantiusChlorus (1314991)]

"Your password must be at least 18770 characters and cannot repeat any of your previous 30689 passwords."

See KB276304 [microsoft.com]

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

[dschuetz (10924)]

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.")

TCFA

[halcyon1234 (834388)]

For those who just want the lame list:

1. Abort, Retry, Fail? (MS-DOS)
2. Guru Meditation (Commodore Amiga)
3. The Red Screen of Death (Windows)
4. Power On Self-Test Beep (PCs)
5. FailWhale (Twitter)
6. lp0 on fire (Unix)
7. Kernel Panic (Unix/Macintosh)
8. Windows Must Restart Because the Remote Procedure Call (RPC)
9. Service Terminated Unexpectedly (Windows)
10. Does Not Compute (Lost in Space, etc.)
11. The Red Ring of Death (Xbox 360)
12. Sad Mac (Macintosh)
13. 404 File Not Found (Web)
14. The Blue Screen of Death (Windows)

And in refernce to the summary:

I chose to limit myself to one fictional error message in this list, but I could go on: If I ever produce a sequel to this story, I guarantee you that "I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that" will be on it,

Re:Talk about a missed opportunity- Printer on fir

[nbert (785663)]

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...

Re:Talk about a missed opportunity- Printer on fir

[uxr (971179)]

PC LOAD LETTER

What the fuck does that mean?

Re:Quite a good read.

[gnick (1211984)]

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.

Re:A system call that should never fail has failed

[element-o.p. (939033)]

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."