The Thirteen Greatest Error Messages of All Time 623
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.
Sad Mac and Startup Beep (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
A system call that should never fail has failed. (Score:4, Interesting)
"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:Sad Mac and Startup Beep (Score:5, Interesting)
I liked the early powerpc macs that made the sound of a car crash when the failed to boot.
Beware (Score:5, Interesting)
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..
Guru Meditation (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Your site is padded with ads. Continue? (Score:5, Interesting)
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!
OS 360 ABEND core dump (Score:4, Interesting)
How about.... (Score:5, Interesting)
See KB276304 [microsoft.com]
"Nobody knows why it's blue..." (Score:5, Interesting)
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.")
Re:Kernel Panic!!! (Score:4, Interesting)
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...
Re:The error no one wishes to hear. (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:Beware (Score:5, Interesting)
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!
Abo Ret Igno (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:ed -- the question mark! (Score:3, Interesting)
Fault Horn (Score:4, Interesting)
Technically, BSOD is not an error message (Score:3, Interesting)
It's like saying an ocean is my favorite type of animal, as opposed to a dolphin.
PS/2 BIOS Screen Glyphography (Score:4, Interesting)
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!
OK buttons (Score:3, Interesting)
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.)
Re:Kernel Panic!!! (Score:4, Interesting)
I have to say, this is by far my favorite 404 [thcnet.net].
Missing: R Tape loading error (Score:2, Interesting)