People just love error messages. Love ‘em, love ‘em, love ‘em. At least that’s the conclusion I’m drawing right now: “The 13 Greatest Error Messages of All Time” is by far the most popular story in Technologizer’s short history. And hundreds of folks didn’t just read the article–they shared their own favorite errors in the comments, with at least as much passion as the community brings to burning subjects such as the iPhone NDA or the fate of Windows XP.
I thoroughly enjoyed delving into all that feedback and learning about errors which I’d never heard of…and in some cases, being reintroduced to ones which I’d managed to block out of my memory. If you don’t have time to burrow through nearly 400 comments’ worth of conversation like I did, I understand–and I’m here to help. Here are some truly outstanding error messages, selected from all the ones mentioned in comments by a blue-ribbon panel which consisted of…well, me. I focused on ones that were verifiably real, and mostly on ones mentioned by multiple contributors. And I ended up with a bakers’ dozen of them, just as in the first story.
I call this list The 13 Other Greatest Error Messages of All Time…and as with the first roundup, let’s do it as a countdown, shall we?
13. Nonsense in BASIC (ZX Spectrum)
I am an American, and while that distinction carries any number of benefits and privileges, it does mean that I’ve been deprived of some truly inspired error messages over the years. Back in the 1980s, the UK’s wildly popular ZX Spectrum home computer sported a version of the BASIC programming language that responded to errors on the user’s part with a message that was snippy and even a little insulting: “Nonsense in BASIC.” If I had owned a Spectrum, I’d have done my best to avoid being chided by my computer that way. Which might have made me a better programmer, and therefore grateful that it minced no words.
12. Make: Don’t know how to make love. Stop. (Unix)
If you’re not a Unix nerd, this one almost isn’t worth your time. But it came up multiple times in comments, so it’s clearly beloved by some. It’s one of a number of nerdy Unix games that involves entering a Unix command with purposefully meaningless modifiers or other errors that cause Unix to respond with an unintentionally funny message. In this case, you enter “make love,” with make being a Unix command and love being a meaningless modifier. Unix responds with Make: Don’t know how to make love, which–oh, let’s just move on to errors that are easier to explain…
11, 10, and 9. WHAT?, HOW?, and SORRY (TRS-80 Level I BASIC)
I’ve encountered these messages many times myself, but had forgotten about them until commenter John brought them up. When Radio Shack’s TRS-80 personal computer debuted in 1977, it shipped only with a programming language known as Level I BASIC. It fit in 4KB of memory–.0039 of one megabyte, and one-third of the space used by the image of a TRS-80 on the right–which left little room for features and virtually no room for fripperies such as error messages. So it had only three of them, all of which consisted of one word (rendered in ALL CAPS–the original TRS-80 also didn’t pamper owners with luxuries such as lower-case letters). WHAT? meant that the TRS-80 didn’t understand you, perhaps because you’d made a typo. HOW? meant you were asking it to do something impossible, such as divide by zero. And SORRY usually meant that the computer had run out of memory…which happened all the time.
With only three errors to cover every possible problem, the TRS-80 was necessarily general rather than specific. But unlike many computers of the era, it didn’t spew errors laden with numbers or abbreviations. There’s a weird elegance in WHAT?, HOW?, and SORRY–and that’s not something you can say about many error messages.
8. You don’t exist. Go away. (Unix)
Computer geeks are known for their lack of social graces. Unix (and latter-day offspring such as Linux) are known for being loved by computer geeks. End result: Unix has more brusque, undiplomatic error messages than any other operating system. Such as You Don’t Exist. Go Away, an error which Unix systems sometimes fling at the user when there’s a password-related problem. It’s delightfully dismissive and demeaning–I’m saying this as someone who’s never gotten it, of course–and, like many great error messages, is gratuitously unhelpful. It’s also the only message here which makes me think of both an Eleanor Roosevelt quote (“No one can make you feel inferior without your permission”) and an Emily Dickenson poem (“I’m nobody! Who are you?”).
7. Silly (Acorn BBC Microcomputer)
Yup, another error message from a 1980s British machine! Silly wasn’t how the “Beeb” responded to any error on the user’s part that might reasonably be called silly. Instead, it reserved the message for instances in which the user attempted to renumber or auto-enter a BASIC program with line numbers that incremented by zero (which was impossible) or more than 255 (which was possible but excessive). Maybe I’m reading an empathetic tone into the message that isn’t really there, but I don’t see Silly as a potshot–it feels more like an amused appreciation of an intentionally comical act by the user. In other words, the BBC was laughing with its owner rather than at him or her. It’s a pity that more error messages aren’t so ingratiating.
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October 8th, 2008 at 3:41 pm
You forgot
?Redo from start
The great commodore 64 and 128 basic error message when things didnt compute
October 16th, 2008 at 7:01 pm
For people in Britain or who get British television shows, there’s a relatively recent “error” message taken from the comedy sketch show Little Britain — “Computer says no.” … although it’s originally a user reporting this state (an annoyingly unhelpful bank teller ‘Carol Beer’ informing the customer the computer system refuses to allow the customer’s request, and ending by coughing in the customer’s face), in recent years it’s become a way of reporting computing mishaps and errors. Including an error I once wrote, ‘ComputerSaysNoException’ (for testing purposes … but of course it never got backed out and made it to production).
October 18th, 2008 at 6:25 pm
What about that favorite from the Commodore Amiga?
“Guru Meditation Error”
which resulted from virtually ANY system-related crash.
October 21st, 2008 at 4:46 am
Also, Windows 3.1’s message “Printer Error”. It was usually accurate, but never precise; if I recall correctly, it could mean that the network which joined the PC and the printer had failed, that the wrong paper tray had been selected, etc, etc. Oh, the remembered pain in tracking down the cause of such problems.
October 21st, 2008 at 6:44 am
I remember back in the day when printing presses were this big firetraps, the operator output would record a Paper Jam as “Error: Printer on Fire”
That got the techs but moving fast. It still can be seen in some UNIX based OS’s
October 22nd, 2008 at 2:15 pm
My all time favorite: “?Program lost, sorry”
from the PDP-11 RSTS/E Basic interpreter when it couldn’t garbage collect enough memory to keep going. (Java is not the first byte-encoded language with GC.)
Jonathan
October 22nd, 2008 at 7:26 pm
I like the error message in psychonauts PC.
The worlds greatest game Psychonauts! has stopped working.
October 28th, 2008 at 9:49 pm
Dudes: “Guru Meditation” and “lp0 (printer) on fire” have already been mentioned in the original Greatest Error Messages of All Time. FTW.
November 3rd, 2008 at 12:18 am
Some error message while using XP went like this:
“You should never see this error message”
November 7th, 2008 at 4:06 pm
I found another awesome error the other day when texting on my phone.
“Message could not be sent: General Error”
November 28th, 2008 at 9:05 am
Anyone who’s used Microsoft Access extensively knows the “Invalid Argument.” error, which means that the 2GB limit of a database has been reached. Why they couldn’t say “Database too large,” or something to that effect, is beyond me! This is probably one of the most frustrating errors that I’ve encountered because– more than once– it’s cost me several hours of time trying to figure out what was wrong.
November 28th, 2008 at 1:04 pm
computer says Noooooooooooooooo
December 7th, 2008 at 5:39 pm
My favorite error message of all time is from NNTP servers that denied access to a user: “You have no permission to talk. Goodbye”. :)
December 8th, 2008 at 3:39 pm
When the keyboard faulted while booting a PC, i used have fun with this error message from DOS:
Keyboard not present
Press a key to continue
-i don’t see that message for years so syntax may not be fully correct but ya’ll know what i’m talking about…
:D
very confused pc
December 15th, 2008 at 7:48 am
It’s not an error message, but I think it’s still in the spirit of these. When installing Windows XP (I think), you have to reboot a few times. At one point, you get a message prior to reboot: “Press finish to continue starting Windows.” Are you going to finish, continue, or start? Just another example where the programmers didn’t put thought into the user experience, and sacrificed sensibility for quicker programming.
December 15th, 2008 at 11:27 am
This is from a Motorola Canopy radio. It happens when you miskey the password (firmware version 7.3.6):
Unauthorized (401)
Through a series of highly sophisticated and complex algorithms, this system has determined that you are not presently authorized to use this system function. It could be that you simply mistyped a password, or, it could be that you are some sort of interplanetary alien-being that has no hands and, thus, cannot type. If I were a gambler, I would bet that a cat (an orange tabby named Sierra or Harley) somehow jumped onto your keyboard and forgot some of the more important pointers from those typing lessons you paid for. Based on the actual error encountered, I would guess that the feline in question simply forgot to place one or both paws on the appropriate home keys before starting. Then again, I suppose it could have been a keyboard error caused by some form of cosmic radiation; this would fit nicely with my interplanetary alien-being theory. If you think this might be the cause, perhaps you could create some sort of underground bunker to help shield yourself from it. I don’t know that it will work, but, you will probably feel better if you try something.
December 16th, 2008 at 11:26 am
My favorite has to be from Linux. Linux programmers definitely have a twisted sense of humor LOL. It makes you think ‘well doh’ hehe.
Error received while compiling a Linux kernel:
“Kernel Panic. This really should never happen.”
December 16th, 2008 at 1:02 pm
When I worked at Calif. DOJ, we had a utility program that had a one-word message for any error – Wrong!
December 16th, 2008 at 2:00 pm
“Out of Memor”
December 18th, 2008 at 7:46 am
Some of my favourites from BeOS:
“This user name and password aren’t getting me anywhere. This server (servername) wouldn’t so much as spit on me if I were on fire!”
(alt. version: “Have you tried checking for post-it notes on your co-workers’ desks?”)
“I can’t find the CIFS browsing server for this workgroup … Please check your CIFS network settings and/or complain to your system administrator.”
December 23rd, 2008 at 12:30 pm
The Mac “car crash” sound was used in some models between approximately 1993 and 2000. Earlier models used a beep, chord or musical instrument sound.
December 26th, 2008 at 5:47 pm
A linux related message thanks to great humor from us developers.
Error: Program can be used as a weapon of mass destruction therefore only root may run it
January 2nd, 2009 at 7:08 am
The TI-99 series of computers, the 99/4A was my particular experience, had the TI BASIC error
* CAN’T DO THAT
and
* CAN’T DO THAT IN [linenumber]
It always reminded me of HAL.
Then there’s always our beloved Amiga’s “Guru Meditation,” which has been resurrected in Sun’s VirtualBox.
January 2nd, 2009 at 9:45 am
“Fatal Error F-27 Disk Full”
The early WordStar (on a floppy disk CP/M machine) telling you that you’d typed one more character than the disk would hold, and everything was lost for good.
January 2nd, 2009 at 1:26 pm
It always hurts my feelings when an error message advises me to contact my administrator, even though I’m working on my home network. It knows what the problem is but thinks I’m too simple to understand.
January 2nd, 2009 at 2:12 pm
i got an error on windows once that said: “error there was no error”.
January 3rd, 2009 at 6:26 am
I maintain a personal archive of screwy error messages I have received over the decades here:
ftp://www.rblevin.net/errors/
January 3rd, 2009 at 7:33 am
sbwhxjbbydgbjuinwell, hi admin adn people nice forum indeed. how’s life? hope it’s introduce branch ;)
January 3rd, 2009 at 8:19 am
Thanks for the trip down memory lane!
One of the first computer error messages I personally encountered was in the mid 1970s on a DEC-10 running BASIC. The error message was,
ERROR – TYPE HELP FOR HELP
and when the user dutifully typed “HELP”….
SORRY, I CAN’T HELP YOU
At least it apologized!
January 3rd, 2009 at 11:29 am
Great history .. its still hard to find a good mouse with a thumb button ..for gaming ofcourse…
January 4th, 2009 at 10:34 am
I once had an Hard Disc MP3-player from Rio which was called Karma. One day the Hard Disc made funny noises, and it didn’t boot completely up. So I bootet it in Work Mode, which was intended for firmware updates, and it showed me the error message: Bad Karma.
I could have killed it…
January 12th, 2009 at 2:55 pm
Any of the myriad of errors translated from Japanese to English in Windows.
i.e. The fish cannot reach the river.
January 13th, 2009 at 9:41 pm
My MSI KT6V motherboard has been known (on occasion) to give me the error message “The BIOS does not be installed.” This happens when I have my boot settings incorrect in just the right places. Seems reminiscent of AYB if you ask me…
January 20th, 2009 at 11:03 am
My favourite is one I still encounter to this day, in Windows Server logs.
“Windows NT has encountered the following error: Operation completed successfully.”
It’s WORKING?!? Definitely an error somewhere . . . :)
January 20th, 2009 at 5:10 pm
I remember this from Win98:
“Cannot delete file. Not enough disk space.”
January 21st, 2009 at 1:48 am
You forgot one famous Windows 3.1 error: “General Failure Reading Disk C:”. Who is that General Failure and why is he reading my disk????
January 23rd, 2009 at 6:59 am
Error in drive z; please reboot universe (discworld 2 [pc game])
January 24th, 2009 at 9:54 pm
My favourite was in BSD 4.2 in one of their tty drivers:
‘Help me, help me, help me! I am being beat over the head by an old man with a stick!’
The source code did say ‘You should never get here’ in a comment.
Try as I might, I never did figure out a way to provoke the error. But the error stuck with me all these years.
January 25th, 2009 at 11:57 am
ok, time to stop using the word: “zeitgeist “… make use of a thesaurus please.
February 19th, 2009 at 2:23 pm
Not so much an error message, but still gives me chills when it happens. When you insert a game into the original nintendo, press down, turn on the system, and get the flashing screen. then you try and try again with no advail.
March 18th, 2009 at 5:53 am
What? No General Protection Faults?
March 30th, 2009 at 9:44 am
Type “net helpmsg 4006″ at the command prompt of any Windows box. Here’s what you get:
“Replication with a nonconfigured partner is not allowed.”
I don’t know how to provoke error 4006, but the message is really funny… and it’s even fairly recent!
May 4th, 2009 at 2:03 pm
Along with “PC LOAD LETTER” came the just-as-eloquent “ME FEED COM 10″ when LaserJet printers were looking for an envelope.
May 11th, 2009 at 11:19 am
I guess the earliest universal computer error we all encountered, and long before we had computers we touched on a daily basis:
“boo dee DEE — The number you have dialed — five, five, five, one, two, one, two — is not in service. Please check the number and try your call again.”
In earlier days, this message ended with:
“If you need further assistance, please ask your operator. This is a recording.” This part was back when operators were actually available as easily as a single key press (“0″), and people were so unaccustomed to hearing prerecorded voices that they might attempt to engage in a conversation with it.
There is a strong possibility that this may be the most commonly encountered error message ever (so far), with one exception:
The busy signal. Universally known, but slightly different sounding from country to country. The busy signal was useful shorthand for “you can’t call that number because the phone is off the hook.” Which was fortunate, because why call someone, if they are already talking to someone else? It made perfect sense in the days before voice mail.
I believe this qualifies as an error message, because it indicated that the request was abandoned, and the device needed to be re-booted before another attempt was made.
May 14th, 2009 at 12:06 pm
With Taiwanese english, the “no keyboard found” error becomes:
Keyboard doesn’t found. Press to continue.
May 14th, 2009 at 12:08 pm
(Corrected)
With Taiwanese english, the “no keyboard found” error becomes:
Keyboard doesn’t found. Press F1 to continue.
May 17th, 2009 at 3:35 pm
I just laughed out loud (literally) at the fact that when I clicked the video for the HAL clip I got the youtube equivalent of an error message:
“This video has been removed by the user.”
June 15th, 2009 at 9:41 am
The Guru Meditation error (mentioned in the other article) wasn’t the only weird error message on the Amiga. The Guru Meditation itself (called an “Alert” in AmigaOS) was perceived as jarring by many users (especially the version that pushed down the desktop screen to display the message), so Commodore changed it in later versions of the OS to be more user-friendly. The “Guru Meditation” text was omitted, and there were amber (non-critical) and red (critical) versions. Many people also don’t know that the Alert was a standard function of the EXEC kernel, and so many programmers used it for serious (or sometimes, not so serious) error messages.
But more scary than the Alert was the error dialog displayed on the desktop when a task encountered a less critical exception: “Software error, task held. Finish ALL disk activity. Select Cancel to Reset/Debug” (can’t remember the exact wording, but I think it was very similar). Then, when you actually clicked on Cancel, the screen was usually moved down to display an Alert (amber or red), often followed by another, more serious (red) Alert after the next reboot.
Another thing was the built-in debugger in the AmigaOS 1.x versions: If you had a text terminal attached to the Amiga (which was often useful for debugging multithreaded apps or drivers), the Amiga would enter debugging mode when either DEL was pressed on the keyboard during a reboot sequence, or when the user pressed the right mouse button during an Alert. System APIs made it possible to write custom debuggers for the development phase for displaying internal data for a program. In later versions of AmigaOS, you had to attach another Amiga with a specialized program to use the ROM debugger (now called SAD), which made the entire feature fairly useless.
June 15th, 2009 at 10:54 am
Though much more silly and harmless, the Amiga had another great baffler that I remember.
Format a disk with default settings and then copy or save too much data to it, and you are presented with a requester proudly proclaiming
“Volume Empty is full!”
It was always a treat to ponder the Taoist implications of this message while scavenging for another disk. :D
June 15th, 2009 at 3:03 pm
Once when I was trying to resolve a problem with a printer named gilligan, a Security popup in WinXP informed me that “You do not have permission to view the current permission settings for gilligan on selfserve, but you can make permission changes.”
I sent a screen shot to the IT people, who were quite amused. They fixed it, but I never did figure out how to change permissions that I couldn’t see.
June 15th, 2009 at 8:11 pm
While running an accounting package from an independent vendor:
“Unable to calculate tax rate from file. Update resume, give notice” – with an OK button as the only choice.
June 16th, 2009 at 5:32 pm
Good point about the errors being mostly old ones. I think there’s a certain personal link between the programmer and user that’s now all but lost in modern computing. It’s a shame that the goal of software developers nowadays seems to be to fool people into thinking they’re using a magic box rather than a computer. However, I think charming errors will always remain in free software because there’s no onus on the developer not to scare the users. On a related note, there are some quite funny comments left in the Linux kernel code. Linus likes to keep them in, it seems
June 18th, 2009 at 1:35 am
I can’t remember which program it was, but it gave me an error message that just said: “error” and that than gave me three options: Yes, No or Abort. I just couldn’t figure out the right answer, on the other hand, none of them actualy helped.
June 21st, 2009 at 12:30 am
What about the Amstrad CPC “Read Error B”? IIrc you could have “Read Error A” too, maybe there was others but I never came across them.
July 5th, 2009 at 4:44 am
On the old BBC Micro, using the Acorn View wordprocessor. If you typed the word “Wheelchair” in the command screen, the error message came back : “Invalid Command”
July 20th, 2009 at 3:52 pm
A combination of an error message and bit of useless trivia: The last error code in the ROM of the original PC was ‘cannot divide by 0′, and any error situation that didn’t have a specific message got that error message as a sort of ‘well, we tried’. That could lead to some confusion when you were trying to print to an offline printer, for example.
July 28th, 2009 at 2:41 pm
The old Hewlett Packard HP3000 minicomputers were booted up from the disc drive known as LDEV 1. When LDEV 1 was not online during the bootup, the console would beep and the following message would print
LDEV1 not ready, Put drive online right now!!
I always imagined somewhere deep in the innards of the machine some operating system troll was tapping his foot and getting angry.
August 11th, 2009 at 4:30 am
Symantec’s backup exec once produced an error dialog that had the title “Catastrophic Failure” and just a button with “OK” on it…
August 13th, 2009 at 10:12 am
Does no one remember the Illegal Operation error? Most hateful error ever, in my opinion, as it immediately led to the loss of everything you were working on!
November 5th, 2009 at 1:42 pm
From an old King’s Quest game (don’t remember which one), I used to constantly get the error:
“Out of heap space”
Always happened at the same spot, near the end of the game. Of course, users had (and still have) no idea what “heap space” is, nor should they. The message, like so many, seemed to have been designed for the programmer.
December 31st, 2009 at 2:59 pm
The PDP-11 (a DEC minicomputer) had a the TECO editor, which would occasionally intone:
?Cannot happened has happened
Although not an error message, the IBM System 360 Principles of Operation manual states: “If an undetectable error occurs, the processor continues as if no error had occurred.”
January 28th, 2010 at 10:57 am
One of the Mac OS system 6 or 7 programs would change the mouse cursor from an arrow to the face with hands on either side from Edward Munch’s painting “The Scream” when it was running out of memory (at least that seemed to be the cause) just before the bomb icon box came up. Good at least for provoking a laugh while your unsaved work vanished! Still my favorite, although I always liked the ability to add an error handling package to Perl called Coy that converted the Perl errors to haiku.
February 12th, 2010 at 2:01 pm
Funny error I saw once. On a printer, it said “Head cold”. It was a thermal printer stationed outside on a loading dock, which wouldn’t work when the printer head dropped below a certain temperature. At that time, it would start to display “Head cold” and redirect its jobs. Now why can’t I redirect my jobs when I get a head cold?