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The Thirteen Greatest Error Messages of All Time 623

Posted by samzenpus from the let-them-down-easy dept.
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.

*

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The Thirteen Greatest Error Messages of All Time More

The Thirteen Greatest Error Messages of All Time

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  • and the fourteenth error should be... (Score:5, Funny)

    by houbou ( 1097327 ) on Wednesday September 24, 2008 @01:53PM (#25139317) Journal
    Error, Windows Vista detected on Drive C: prepare to acknowledge, confirm and reboot.

  • The Daily WTF (Score:5, Informative)

    by mini_razor ( 1306073 ) on Wednesday September 24, 2008 @01:54PM (#25139339)
    www.thedailywtf.com has a great selection of error messages. Some are absolute genius!

  • go away. (Score:5, Funny)

    by thhamm ( 764787 ) on Wednesday September 24, 2008 @01:55PM (#25139355)
    missing /etc/passwd, tried to login as root:
    "you don't exist. go away."

  • Where's the keyboard error? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Kentaree ( 1078787 ) on Wednesday September 24, 2008 @01:55PM (#25139359) Homepage
    Surely "Keyboard Error: Press Any Key To Continue" should have been in there somewhere?

  • Missing Option (Score:5, Insightful)

    by dintech ( 998802 ) on Wednesday September 24, 2008 @01:55PM (#25139363)
    Username or password invalid. It's probably got the most face time...

  • Your site is padded with ads. Continue? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 24, 2008 @01:56PM (#25139371)

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

  • Commodore 64... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Norwell Bob ( 982405 ) on Wednesday September 24, 2008 @01:56PM (#25139385)
    SYNTAX ERROR

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

  • The error no one wishes to hear. (Score:5, Funny)

    by houbou ( 1097327 ) on Wednesday September 24, 2008 @01:58PM (#25139425) Journal
    Error, Water Detected in Drive C:

  • They missed it: (Score:5, Funny)

    by LibertineR ( 591918 ) on Wednesday September 24, 2008 @01:58PM (#25139429)
    "Congratulations, your Lotus Notes installation is complete."

  • Greatest? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by kellyb9 ( 954229 ) on Wednesday September 24, 2008 @01:58PM (#25139431)
    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 (Score:5, Funny)

    by reydelamirienda ( 892327 ) on Wednesday September 24, 2008 @02:02PM (#25139481)
    +++ Divide By Cucumber Error. Please Reinstall Universe And Reboot +++

  • Hey I got an error trying to access TFA (Score:3, Funny)

    by isBandGeek() ( 1369017 ) on Wednesday September 24, 2008 @02:02PM (#25139493)
    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

  • the BSOD screensaver (Score:5, Funny)

    by gardyloo ( 512791 ) on Wednesday September 24, 2008 @02:03PM (#25139503)

    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.

  • Sad Mac and Startup Beep (Score:5, Interesting)

    by samkass ( 174571 ) on Wednesday September 24, 2008 @02:03PM (#25139519) Homepage Journal

    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.

  • Linux took humor in error messages even farther: (Score:4, Funny)

    by J. T. MacLeod ( 111094 ) on Wednesday September 24, 2008 @02:04PM (#25139533)

    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. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 24, 2008 @02:05PM (#25139563)

    "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

    • Re:A system call that should never fail has failed (Score:5, Insightful)

      by element-o.p. ( 939033 ) on Wednesday September 24, 2008 @02:47PM (#25140363) Homepage

      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."

  • A long time ago... (Score:5, Funny)

    by fahrbot-bot ( 874524 ) on Wednesday September 24, 2008 @02:07PM (#25139597)
    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 (Score:5, Funny)

    by azadrozny ( 576352 ) on Wednesday September 24, 2008 @02:08PM (#25139605)
    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" (Score:5, Funny)

    by Burning1 ( 204959 ) on Wednesday September 24, 2008 @02:08PM (#25139617) Homepage

    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 "jazz@webtv.net". 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 (Score:5, Insightful)

    by f0dder ( 570496 ) on Wednesday September 24, 2008 @02:13PM (#25139711)
    This should of been on the list.

  • And on the flipside: (Score:5, Insightful)

    by omarius ( 52253 ) <omar AT allwrong DOT com> on Wednesday September 24, 2008 @02:15PM (#25139737) Homepage Journal

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

  • Why not to trust Wikipedia (Score:4, Informative)

    by russotto ( 537200 ) on Wednesday September 24, 2008 @02:16PM (#25139773) Journal

    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.

  • Long long long is too long (Score:3, Funny)

    by getuid() ( 1305889 ) on Wednesday September 24, 2008 @02:22PM (#25139849)
    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

  • What? How? Sorry! (Score:3)

    by HornWumpus ( 783565 ) on Wednesday September 24, 2008 @02:22PM (#25139855)
    TRS-80 level 1 basic was a joy.

  • Beware (Score:5, Interesting)

    by codepunk ( 167897 ) on Wednesday September 24, 2008 @02:25PM (#25139893)

    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 (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Amazing Quantum Man ( 458715 ) on Wednesday September 24, 2008 @03:23PM (#25140885) Homepage

      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 (Score:5, Funny)

    by 2short ( 466733 ) on Wednesday September 24, 2008 @02:25PM (#25139895)
    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 (Score:5, Insightful)

    by treeves ( 963993 ) on Wednesday September 24, 2008 @02:26PM (#25139909) Homepage Journal
    "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 (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Quiet_Desperation ( 858215 ) on Wednesday September 24, 2008 @02:27PM (#25139923)
    I think everyone remembers their first segmentation fault or core dump.

  • Guru Meditation (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Hatta ( 162192 ) on Wednesday September 24, 2008 @02:27PM (#25139937) Journal

    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.

  • too many pages (Score:4, Funny)

    by doti ( 966971 ) on Wednesday September 24, 2008 @02:29PM (#25139969) Homepage

    They missed this one:

    "Too many pages on the article."

  • I also like: (Score:3, Funny)

    by omarius ( 52253 ) <omar AT allwrong DOT com> on Wednesday September 24, 2008 @02:33PM (#25140057) Homepage Journal

    "Aieee, killing interrupt handler" (Linux kernel)

    PS, hey, I still have Excellent karma... why no bonus? Now I'm, like, nobody!

  • Uber Classic Missing Message (Score:4, Funny)

    by Nom du Keyboard ( 633989 ) on Wednesday September 24, 2008 @02:37PM (#25140133)
    I didn't see the most classic: Excuse me, but there's a moth caught in one of my relays.

  • Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Wednesday September 24, 2008 @02:37PM (#25140149)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Explaining ARF (Score:5, Informative)

      by DragonHawk ( 21256 ) on Wednesday September 24, 2008 @09:50PM (#25146119) Homepage Journal

      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.

  • OS 360 ABEND core dump (Score:4, Interesting)

    by peter303 ( 12292 ) on Wednesday September 24, 2008 @02:51PM (#25140413)
    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.

  • Raytheon RDS 500 (Score:4, Funny)

    by rumblin'rabbit ( 711865 ) on Wednesday September 24, 2008 @02:55PM (#25140475) Journal
    The Raytheon RDS 500's of the 1970's sometimes gave the following compiler error:

    Eror

    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.

  • Not enough disk space to delete files (Score:3, Funny)

    by IIH ( 33751 ) on Wednesday September 24, 2008 @02:56PM (#25140479)
    My favourite error is from NT:

    "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

  • How about.... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ConstantiusChlorus ( 1314991 ) on Wednesday September 24, 2008 @02:59PM (#25140523)
    "Your password must be at least 18770 characters and cannot repeat any of your previous 30689 passwords."

    See KB276304 [microsoft.com]

  • My all-time favorite from Windows ... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by LaughingCoder ( 914424 ) on Wednesday September 24, 2008 @03:03PM (#25140587)
    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.

  • "Nobody knows why it's blue..." (Score:5, Interesting)

    by dschuetz ( 10924 ) <.gro.tensad. .ta. .divad.> on Wednesday September 24, 2008 @03:05PM (#25140601)

    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.")

  • Lp0: on fire (Score:3, Funny)

    by Sasayaki ( 1096761 ) on Wednesday September 24, 2008 @03:09PM (#25140663)

    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."

  • TCFA (Score:5, Informative)

    by halcyon1234 ( 834388 ) <halcyon1234@hotmail.com> on Wednesday September 24, 2008 @04:01PM (#25141557) Journal

    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,

  • Fault Horn (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Detritus ( 11846 ) on Wednesday September 24, 2008 @04:01PM (#25141565) Homepage
    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.

  • What a rich topic (Score:4, Funny)

    by anorlunda ( 311253 ) on Wednesday September 24, 2008 @04:11PM (#25141743) Homepage

    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

  • No BeOS love? (Score:4, Funny)

    by c_forq ( 924234 ) <forquerc+slash@gmail.com> on Wednesday September 24, 2008 @05:22PM (#25143121)
    Does no one remember the haikus of BeOS?

  • PS/2 BIOS Screen Glyphography (Score:4, Interesting)

    by bradgoodman ( 964302 ) on Wednesday September 24, 2008 @05:48PM (#25143509) Homepage
    Unfortunately, they were probably too rare and obscure to make it into the list, by the BIOS error screens on the old PS/2's should get some sort of an "honorable mention".

    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!

    ...if of course, I knew where the manual was...

  • Pikers all of them... (Score:4, Funny)

    by DerekLyons ( 302214 ) <fairwater@@@gmail...com> on Wednesday September 24, 2008 @06:43PM (#25144333) Homepage

    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...

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