Comments on: The 13 Other Greatest Error Messages of All Time

By: Snagglery

Snagglery — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 21:42:47 +0000

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.

By: pWEN

pWEN — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 17:12:41 +0000

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!

By: SputnikHats9000

SputnikHats9000 — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 11:30:47 +0000

Symantec’s backup exec once produced an error dialog that had the title “Catastrophic Failure” and just a button with “OK” on it…

By: BruceM

BruceM — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 21:41:45 +0000

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.

By: Mike Cocke

Mike Cocke — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 22:52:38 +0000

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.

By: northernheckler

northernheckler — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 11:44:36 +0000

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”

By: Steve Euden

Steve Euden — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 07:30:43 +0000

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.

By: Warg

Warg — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 08:35:23 +0000

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.

By: Mark O'Neill

Mark O'Neill — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 00:32:40 +0000

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

By: D

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 03:11:57 +0000

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.