In this post-floppy era, few of us encounter it. ARF was probably the first error message to become part of the cultural zeitgeist, as witness its use as the title of a long-running PC Magazine column and a 1996 album by UK technopop act White Town. It’s Abort, Retry, Fail?–known in earlier incarnations of MS-DOS by the equally uninformative name Abort, Retry, Ignore?. And by forcing you to choose between three options, none of which is likely to help, it throws the problem back in your face. (What’s the difference between Abort and Fail?) It could indicate either a minor glitch (you forgot to put a floppy disk in the drive) or catastrophe (your hard drive had died). In many ways, it remains an error message to judge other error messages by. Ready? Let’s work through the list, starting with number thirteen and working our way up to the greatest error message of ’em all. Your rankings probably differ from mine, which is why this story ends with a poll on the last page. I ranked them on a variety of factors, including how many people they bedeviled over the years, their aesthetic appeal or lack thereof, and the likelihood that they were notifying you of a genuine computing disaster. An entire company, the wonderfully-named Errorwear, exists to emblazon the images of such classic errors as the Blue Screen of Death (in four variations!), Guru Meditation, Red Ring of Death, and Sad Mac on T-shirts.Īnd then there’s this article–my stab at rounding up the major error messages of the past thirty years or so. That’s a big part of why people form clubs to celebrate them, have them tattooed on their person, chronicle them for Wikipedia, and name albums after them. In fact, people have an emotional attachment to many of them–like Proust’s Madeleine, an error message from a machine out of your past can transport you back in time. In multiple ways, most of them represent technology at its most irritating. They tend to be cryptic they rarely offer an apology even when one is due they like to provide useless information like hexadecimal numbers and to withhold facts that would be useful, like plain-English explanations of how to right want went wrong. In theory, error messages should be painful at worst and boring at best. Hence the need for error messages, which have been around nearly as long as computers themselves. One of the defining things about computers is that they–or, more specifically, the people who program them–get so many things so very wrong. ”To err is human, but to really foul things up you need a computer.” So goes an old quip attributed to Paul Ehrlich.
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