(Image borrowed from Geek.com)

Software developers have a strange attitude towards notifying their customers of product error. They rarely just explain what happened, and apologize. Well, sometimes they do try, but with an explanation so technical that it’s pointless for us normal human beings. (That may or may not be better than providing an error code rather than actual information on what went wrong.)

There’s also a long-standing tradition of error messages being accompanied by humorous visuals, dating back at least to the Mac’s Bomb and Sad Mac icons, and probably much further than that. And now Geek.com is reporting that Windows 8 has a new sort of Blue Screen of Death that sports an oversized frowny face emoticon. (The developer preview of Windows 8 is buggy, but I haven’t run into any catastrophic errors that trigger this screen myself.)

I don’t get it. Are there any other industries that see failure as an occasion for merriment? I love Chrome, but its suffering browser tab and messages such as “Aw, Snap!” always leave me slightly more irritated than if I’d just gotten a straightforward alert that something had gone awry.

Of course, Windows 8 is merely a developer preview, so its error messages are presumably subject to further tweaking. How about dumping the frowny, Microsoft?

(Side note: The one cheery error message I like is Twitter’s Failwhale, in part because it was designed by my friend Yiying Lu. In fact, I’m almost sorry I rarely see it these days…)

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.

In theory, error messages should be painful at worst and boring at best. 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 multiple ways, most of them represent technology at its most irritating.

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. 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. 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.

And then there’s this article–my stab at rounding up the major error messages of the past thirty years or so. 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. Your rankings probably differ from mine, which is why this story ends with a poll on the last page.

Ready? Let’s work through the list, starting with number thirteen and working our way up to the greatest error message of ‘em all.

13. Abort, Retry, Fail? (MS-DOS)
In many ways, it remains an error message to judge other error messages by. It’s terse. (Three words.) It’s confusing. (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). And by forcing you to choose between three options, none of which is likely to help, it throws the problem back in your face.

It’s Abort, Retry, Fail?–known in earlier incarnations of MS-DOS by the equally uninformative name Abort, Retry, Ignore?. 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. In this post-floppy era, few of us encounter it. But just thinking about the phrase is enough to send me back to the days when I frequently sat at a computer displaying that message, randomly hitting the A, R, and F keys in hopes that something helpful would happen.

12. Guru Meditation (Commodore Amiga)
The Amiga was a famously advanced multimedia computer, considering that it was designed back in the primitive mid-1980s. But its most alarming error message was decidedly minimalist: red text on a black background, dressed up only by a flashing red border. Like many errors, it included some hexadecimal numbers that were meaningless to 99.9999999999999% of folks who encountered them. But it preceded them with the phrase “Guru Meditation.” When I owned an Amiga, I was never sure what that meant; the reference to a state of zen never did a thing to lower my blood pressure. Turns out that it was a self-indulgent reference to a game the Amiga designers used to play with their first product, the Joyboard–an Atari VCS joystick that you stood on. Har, har.

Like Windows’ later Blue Screen of Death, the Guru Meditation had a habit of showing up in the darndest places, thanks to the wide use of Amigas in the broadcasting industry and for other audio/visual tasks. Once I turned on my TV and saw a Guru Meditation onscreen, and reached to reboot my Amiga–until I realized that it wasn’t even the same room. My cable company’s channel guide, it turned out, had crashed.

11. The Red Screen of Death (Windows)
Microsoft’s infamous Screens of Death come in multiple colors? Who knew? According to Wikipedia, some beta versions of Longhorn–the operating system that became Windows Vista–crashed with a full-screen error message that was red rather than the more familiar blue. Wikipedia seems to say that the final version of Vista can die with a red color scheme when the boot loader has problems, too. I’m relieved to say I’ve never encountered that, as far as I can remember.

I do like the idea of an exclusive SoD in a designer color, though. Maybe Microsoft should team with the (Product) Red folks and revive the RSoD as a charitable effort? If I knew that fifty cents went to a worthy cause every time my PC croaked, I’d be at least slightly less apoplectic.