Discussion on:

Looking for memorable error messages

We were creating a developer tool using three different languages: Delphi for the user-interface, C for the system-level stuff, and Synergy/DE for the glue. User requirements forced us to create our own message-box API. With all the hand-shaking between layers, someone confused the definitions for the bit values for what buttons to include on the message box. On the first run, we tried a delete confirmation. It came up "Delete 'filename'?" with the options, "Yes", "OK", and "Retry".

Once, I opened the Breakpoint Explorer in Visual Studio 2008, and double-clicked on the item to go to the line of code. VS thought about it for a minute, then popped up an error message:

"Unable to go to breakpoint. Catastrophic failure."

... There, there, it's all right, Visual Studio.

(In true MS fashion, I tried again just a moment later and it worked.)

Device 6 is Missing

I've only ever see it once and there was no literature available from M$ as to what exactly Device 6 was. After a reboot the system booted and I reloaded DOS to it then went looking at Microsoft. I gave up and called in defeat and rang them to find out what device 6 is supposed to be.

Turns out that it's the CPU but without a CPU I'm at more than a bit of a Loss how anything can be displayed on the screen.

Col

An Oracle Forms app of mine spits out this error message "Ordinary users cannot delete that ..." when unauthorized users attempt to delete something they aren't allowed to.

I was creating a HOBS payment back in the 90's.
The create instruction dialogue box popped up to let me the world as we know isn't real...
"the state of the atom is invalid" - [OKAY]

Damn. That's not "OKAY" at all.

Fatal wigwam errors, I have always wanted to know what a fatal wigwam is, does it have a stabbing extension while folded!

A colleague of mine when he set up a PXE booting deployment system has an error saying "Eek something went wrong..." or if it is only a warning "Ook something went wrong." And for the most annoying there is always the old "Fatal error contact a systems administrator" - cos were psychic!

N

"A internal error broke out" - it was exactly this spelling etc.

I often wondered what kind of internal error it was, and where it broke out from!

"Unable to detect keyboard, press F1 to continue"
Say no more...

"Microsoft Windows encountered an unexpected error"

No description of what the error is/was, but this does suggest that some errors are expected...

I was programming in Fortran on a Data General back in the early 80's and on one run I triggered an error that was displayed as just a number. There was a tool in the OS that allowed you to put in the error code and get a description of the problem. By default the tool was looking for a hex code, but I couldn't tell if the number I had was hex or decimal (I think it was 62), so I requested the error text for the decimal number. The system reported that the error text was

"Universal system. You can't do that."

At that point I realized I was dealing with powers greater than mere mortals, so I shut off all the lights and quietly went home.

I was running a tape backup when the server reported "an unknown HACB error. Possibly no error occurred."

When I was installing Xenix Systems for Radio Shack back in the day, we would get a core dump error. "Error sckmd - Shut her down, Scotty, she's sucking mud!" . We would reboot and everything would be fine.

Most versions of Basic had a renumber command to tidy up your line numbering. BBC Basic would return reasonable error message during normal use of this but if you input exceedingly large numbers to the command it would just return the error "Silly" with no further comment.

Back in the late 70's I tried to compile a COBOL program. The compiler message I got was "Unspecified program error. If program error-free then compiler error". Now, that's some catchall.

I saw, but don't recall where, 'if you can't see this message, click here'

I was attempting to install the original Unreal Tournament from a very scratched disc which the drive was having trouble reading. I tried a few times after cleaning it, running disc doctor type stuff on it, etc. Eventually I got it to work, but on the way I saw this gem:

[unknown]
[unknown] has caused an error in [unknown].
[unknown] will now close.

So, the computer had no idea what was happening, but it was an error by gosh and it was going to close. (It was actually less than and greater than signs around the unknown, but I can't post that in the comment box here.)

While working in the programming department one day, I heard one of my co-workers swearing like a sailor quite loudly. I asked him what was wrong. He replied, "Come here, you have to see this."

We were working in a COBOL environment on an IBM 4341. My co-worker had just been assigned to maintain the payroll system which was home grown. He was attempting to modify the main calculation program which had to be the best example of spaghetti code ever seen in the universe. When I went to his cube and he showed me what was making him red faced.

He was chasing threw the program logic when he found he had now gone to the following paragraph heading and command.

IF-YOU-ARE-HERE-SOMETHING-IS-TERRIBLY-WRONG.
STOP.

One of my co-workers was upset when I suggested he trap all the possible network errors before moving his code to production. He was ticked and wrote a bunch of silly error messages that would never be seen.

But eventually that was fortunate. After a network upgrade, we got Network Error: code word GUMBALL. It was easy to find GUMBALL in the code along with all his other silly code words that we just left there.

I captured and printed this years ago, and have had it posted in my office since then:

"Sorry. Problem detected. Out of free storage. Very Sorry, pine will now crash, please report this."

I used to see this occasionally, which was displayed from some internal system error:
"Error 120 while trying to report error 120"
I never did get to the bottom of it.

In another case, I was developing an application once where there were several conditions that could occur, good bad or otherwise. I was making CASE statements to display the known messages and got distracted by another piece of the project. I hurriedly put a catch-all error message in place so that if it did happen, I would at least get notified. Several years later, I had an end user call me laughing hysterically saying there was this error message on the screen that said:
"I have no idea what the h___ went wrong".

Just recently I was tinkering with combining VPN servers with the front end firewall. I was back and forth between configuring iptables, editing server configs and general juggling, so I'm not sure what component threw the error, which was a gray box with the word "sorry" and no other markings, not even a close button.

The window manager was kind enough to put the "x" in the upper right corner, so I could close it every time it popped up. I never did figure what action resulted in it, I suspect it came after a lengthy time out had been reached.

What good is an error message if there's no clue as to what process has generated it? I'm not a coder so I wasn't about to chase down debug packages, run stack traces etc etc. I was looking for an easy solution...

In the Linux world there are a number of intentionally humorous error messages. When I taught an A+ certification course the students would alter windows error messages for the laugh, stuff like "press any key to format C:"

It's the unintended ones that are truly funny, like the impossible "error 120" loop sparky reported above. You're in the middle of work when suddenly an error message has you pondering quantum physics and the speed of light...

My college professor told me this story in the early 1980s. Professor asked the ATM for some cash and it replied "Insufficient Funds." He checked his balance and saw he had plenty of money but it still refused to give him cash. He called the bank and talked to person after person until he was speaking to the programmer. Programmer searches the code for that error message and checks the causes. Programmer told professor that when the ATM runs out of cash, it has "Insufficient Funds." Programmer promised to change the message text to make it clear that the ATM needs refilling, not the customer's account.

The next time professor gets cash from his ATM, he did a double-take reading the receipt. At the bottom was the remark, "Hi Bob, you have sufficient funds."

When I took a class on coding in c with oracle, we had to trap an error and display a message. To catch the user's attention, I simply read past an array boundary and the computer dumped memory crap to the screen, then displayed Error: Try again at the bottom.

The instructor loved it.

From Microsoft:
"Please insert CD-ROM into Drive A." I have a screen shot somewhere, but I don't recall what I was trying to install.I finally got the install to complete by putting the floppy into the CD drive....

On an old rsts basic system, if you exceeded memory (8k!)
the program just disappeared, and it said
"Program Lost, Sorry".
That wasn't mean enough for us so we changed it to
"Program Lost, Big Deal"

"ah ah ah, you didn't say the magic word!" (movie quote, please tell me someone remembers)

In my .Net course I teach how to change the error messages. One of my students wrote a Monopoly game as his final, but for some whack reason in his code (I don't remember), if you rolled a double 6 the thing would freak and just go in an infinite loop and crash. So he just stuck in an IF error message "You rolled a double 6, that sucks because I have no idea why it makes this program crash and me fail this class"

Got an A

nt

in recovery console "you cannot repair in safe mode"

windows 7 internet diagnostics "windows found a problem you need to access the internet for further help"

BTHomeHub, BTBBDesktop help downloaded from a connected laptop when running on troubled system it stated "you need an internet connection to complete the instilation"

From the days of mini-computers
If booting up between 01:00 and 02:00
msg "are you burning the midnight oil? Y/N _"
if response was "Y" msg was "Bloody Liar"
and boot continued.
Compiling programs in the proprietary language used by the mini:
If more than 35 errors compiler waould throw to a new page and print large "I may be a dumb computer but not so daft as some programmers" then carry on.

This error always annoys me, because obviously it can't say "A known error has occurred"

And of course
"Error, the operation completed successfully"

Sometimes after sending a print job to the printer it fails to print and Windows describes the status of the print job as "Error - Printing."

I have a system that will occasionally throw out one word... PANIC. Oookay... I have many places that could be in a panic state, can you throw me a clue as to the location, at the very least?

I once wrote a short fortran program and tried to compile it on some obscure IBM mainframe. I used the variable name "abs". Turns out "abs" was a reserved word, an for that slight oversight I got 27 pages of error messages.

Using the original "make" program on UNIX, if you typed "make love" it would
respond "Don't know how to make love. Stop."

Ahh, the good old days...

The webmail extension on Mozilla Thunderbird mail client frequently displays this message when it cannot retrieve mails from a Yahoo mail account:
"... negative vibes from Server"

... kind of spooky.

If you fail the authentication on a Motorola Canopy wireless radio you get the following error.

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.

This is not so much an "Error Message" as an error in the message.
A neighbor of mine in the early '80s headed up customer service for desktop manufacturer.
In the installation manual for installing some program, after the 1st 5.25" floppy finished, the following instruction message: "Insert the second floppy disk, and click enter.".
Invariably, his staff would get at least one call a day asking how to remove the two floppy disks from the computer.

Once got this message from a system when attempting a network connection:

"Unable or unwilling to begin dialog".

My favourite has to be my antique Artec scanner driver (it's so old it's for NT4).. which almost daily will at some point pop up "scanner error ???? something happen"

This is my favorite error message as its a message showing that error message can not be obtained .. amazing ..

Long ago, British Rail, as it then was, was installing free-standing terminals on which passengers could plan their journeys. A friend: Tim, wrote the software. If you tried for an impossible routing: e.g. London Kings Cross to Brighton, you were told: "You can't get there from here"
He dropped that just before the customer demonstration, unfortunately.

I recal seeing in a computer magazine a screenshot of an error message from a beta of Windows 98. It read "What did you do?" [OK]. Thanks, Bill - I'm sure that was helpful...

"-r0" "-1" "ENU"
Access is denied.

The first time I tried installing Mandrake Linux (it was a really early release - kinda rough around the edges), I had to fix something from the command prompt, so I chose that option at the installer boot menu, the shell came up, I fixed what I needed, then I issued the command "shutdown -r now" to reboot the computer as gently as possible. The error:

"You don't exist. Go away."

Tried to "exit" the shell - same error. Had to remove power to reboot the computer. After that, the computer booted & worked fine; but that error still ranks right up there as one of the top head-scratchers I'd ever seen.

This was back in the late '80s when I was using the Microsoft C compiler. I had a faulty RAM chip and got this error:

Error #0: Unknown Error. Please contact Microsoft Support.

The dynamic publishing system I work with (Arbortext) has an error handler, but sometimes an error will cause the error handler to fail as well. In that case, the system just reports the error message: "Editor: Crash within crash" and exit.

In one system, where most messages would say, "Press any key to continue", some programmer with a sense of humor (and who I suspect had been smoking some funny smelling stuff), put "Tap a key, Dude"

Uh gee, that's helpful. Or my other favorite that would stop you in your tracks (same program by the way): "No error has occurred". ??!!

First from the early 80's. It's 2:30 a.m. at AFDSDC, only Global Support is working, a phone call:
SystemOperator: "This is Kadena. We have an undocumented message on SPO." (Great big NO.NO.)
Support: "Please read the message".
SystemOperator: "Program is D10, message reads: My boss said this would never happen. I disagree. Please call him at home at xxxx, and tell him he was wrong!"
Support: 'Uh, Kadena, I'll get back to you."

I was called in to review the tapes and find the error in the 27K line cobol program. Little did the two people know that 13 years after having coded the message the disagreement would finally be settled.

2nd Message: While working on an AS400 with single level memory store. All of disk (permanant addresses) and all of memory (temporary addresses) would be available for a program to use. When the temporary addess space filled up, it could cause main storage to be overwritten. To combat this, a threshold was set to send a message when this threshhold was approaching. After uploading a PTF service pack, the chilling message "Threshold of 93% reached, loss of customer database imminent." Halting the runaway jobs occupied two of the senior programmers typing frantically. Final percentage was 99.9998% used.

"The cryptographic subsystem failed a mandatory algorithm self-test during
bootstrap."

You whaaaat???

I've come across this BSOD a few times in the past. It's baffling and the web doesn't have much information about it. Since the system won't allow you to Safe Mode, or Repair Install or even Reinstall the OS I've always had to resort to manual backups and replace or format of the old drive.

This last system was still under warranty with Dell. So I went through the warranty chat, gave the tech all the information, stop code, and error. They then requested I type the ENTIRE blue screen message. (Including the standard Windows message template with a blue screen)

I still have no idea what the BSOD means.

From Access 2003: "There was a problem sending the command to the program".

Yes, well I guessed you had a problem, because you stopped. You haven't actually told me anything more, have you?

While working for a mortgage processing company in the mid-80s, I put together a bulletin board application combining WordPerfect macros, PK-PAK compression utilities (I might have the name wrong; it was the precursor to pkzip, which morphed into winzip, etc.), modem commands, and a couple other things, all distributed on 5-1/4" floppies that we mailed to the customer. They were supposed to put the disk in floppy drive A: and type a command, and all sorts of daisy-chained automated magic would happen: Their PC (probably an 80286) would dial up our bulletin board, log them in, download the day's mortgage rates in zipped format (to save 1200- or 2400-bps bandwidth), log out, then unzip the file and present the rates in both a VisiCalc spreadsheet and a WordPerfect document (unless it was WordStar? It's been a while).

We had one client who was lightyears ahead of the rest of us: They were running an actual "network" using a primitive LAN -- whatever that was -- and so their drive A: was read-only (for the LAN disk, or something), and they had to put our floppy in drive B: instead.

Everything worked until PK-PAK (then still little more than a college-student program that was just barely monetized - we spent a huge $100 on a corporate license) tried to unpack the files to the write-protected Drive A:. The error message was, well...it was personal, not politically correct, and downright misogynistic. Almost got me fired.

Another client with a v-e-r-y slow system complained about the compression data table that PK-PAK threw up: Each column was labeled not with "bits" or "bytes" or "percentage" but "t*ts", "tw*ts" and something I won't even type with asterisks.

Again, I was halfway out the door before I managed to convince my boss that it wasn't something I'd written. It was bad enough that it came from the software I'd convinced him to license when he kept insisting that we should use the free version because "who's ever going to know"? Fortunately for me, he was able to redirect his anger at the pkpak company, who fell all over themselves apologizing.

"Oops. Something went wrong."

Really, are you sure?

In the late 80s, I worked for a very small company. I had never worked on a computer before, and they used a bookkeeping program that was written by the owner of the company. (that's a whole different story!) One day when I was just learning my way around this very odd program, it requested a password. I didn't have one, so I just hit (enter) and this immediately showed on the screen:

YOU STUPID FOOL!

That might have been the moment when I decided to pursue a career in IT.

I was working on a system in COBOL that ran on a Honeywell 6080 (no it's not a thermostat for you young'uns!). One program simply took the user's input command and called up the appropriate program to actually handle the task. While we were developing it, we put had the program return "PTUI!!! Invalid Command, DUMMY!!" if the input command wasn't recognized. As the input command was normally entered via a menu system, not free hand, by the time we wend into production, this was long since forgotten.

Once day, we got a call from a very irate general office's aide. It seems the general had been using a terminal, decided to free-lance a command and was incensed at being told he was a DUMMY!! by the computer and we were to correct this immediately. The corrective action was to replace DUMMY!! with SORRY!!.

Way back in the 70s on a Xerox mainframe there was a Fortran compiler. In Fortran, you could use GO TO nnn statements where nnn was a number. This was not very meaningful so a change was made whereby you could assign a name to the number and then use GO TO name. If you then used the statement GO TO JAIL, you would receive a diagnostic stating, "Go directly. Do not pass go. Do not collect $200."

Until I had a hard drive crash that lost all my data, I had a screen shot from windows XP showing the properties of a CD-RW disk that I had just formatted.

it showed the available drive space on my CD-RW disk as "4.5TB" several of my friends and I got a lot of laughs from that one.

Back in my days as a mainframe vendor rep, I got a call about a console message which said "Communications line 6 is NFG" Thje console operator, being ex-military like me fully understood the term but needed some help figuring out why. Rebooting the modem took care of the problem, but I dropped a note to the guy who was responsible for the communications code teling him that we got a laugh out of the error message. His reply - "I always figured that some user would yank the wires out of the wall and rub them together to make sparks, so I test for all the possbile errors I can think of. If it's not one of them, I default to that error message. And if you're ever forced to explain it, it means Not Feeling Good".

Error 503 Service Unavailable

Service Unavailable
Guru Meditation:

XID: 2067024468

Varnish cache server
The XID changes at each page reload, so that's probably not very useful.

I was attending an early Banyan Vines Network administrator class. The instructor had this neat way of wiping a box totally back to "install" state. It was really useful for classroom instruction; you could let people mess around with group lists, change security, then wipe it back to ground zero with just a command and a reboot.

When you told the O/S to wipe itself, it would ask:
"Are you sure you want to reset this computer"?
You had to type "yes" (lower case yes)
It then asked "Are you really sure?"
You had to type "Yes" (Capital Y, lower case es).
If you didn't, it said
"I didn't think you were" and returned to the previous menu.

It was a bit of Friday afternoon silliness, but I decided to change the login error message on a web application from "Invalid username or password" to "Please remove your glasses so I can punch you."
It went down so well that we have kept it that way for over a year now.

one of the most classic M$ Dos errors
"Found unknown device. Insert Driver for unknown device into the unknown device."

I remember a friend with a TRS80 in fits of laughter when playing some command line [Text] adventure.
He got a bit frustrated being unable to proceed and typed in a couple of 4 letter words, to which the text parser replied that " if he continued using bad language it would promptly shut down the computer! "

Can't install the modem on IRQ 3. IRQ 3 is reserved for the Modem.

I was running a diagnostics application on an Intel 310 Xenix server way back in the late '80s. After about twenty minutes the following message popped up on the screen, "The system produced an error that is not allowed." Huh?!

phpMyAdmin - Error
Cannot start session without errors, please check errors given in your PHP and/or webserver log file and configure your PHP installation properly.

"MacTCP was the standard TCP/IP implementation for the Macintosh operating system through version 7.5.1."

Back in the day, networking computers (for most part) meant dial up networking to a modem bank at a local ISP. I was a tech support guy, slaving over a hot keyboard and trying to help the ID10t population overcome the seriously buggy world of home internet connectivity.

My favorite error was from MacTCP:
"The pissy MacTCP is acting up again."

Most people repeated this error over the phone to me with some sense of amusement.

When connected to the internet via 3G using Globetrotter Connect software, every 20 minutes or so the whole screen goes white and a popup opens over it with the message, "A required resource was", and an OK button.
That's it!
I have no idea what's causing it, and the message is rather unhelpful

When I tried to log into the MyThree website some years ago, the following rather unhelpful (and syntactically incomplete) message was displayed;
"The Error in the subsystem"

The username and password were correct, and it worked again a few hours later, so I think there really was an error in the subsystem

You're not worthy!

You clicked all this way.
Now we aren't going to let you in.
We've got a lot of nerve.

Actually, we would let you in but it seems you haven't been set up to be able to access this page.

You may want to ask your supervisor if you are allowed to be here.

If you really, really need to get in, submit an incident at the Service Center requesting access. If you truly are worthy, we will give you access lickety split.

Error in process XXX : "No Error" (0)

Error in procedure 'error' error code '0'.
Description: Error 0 is not possible

Turns out the error variable used for the error code, was getting reused by another function, problem is, first function returned non 0 if failed, second function returned 0 if failed. So the error handler thought 0 was an error but the look up for the error code didn't have 0 as a possible error. 0 was in the else statement as "Code that should never be run".

Several years ago I had made some changes to the default settings of an HP LaserJet 5P but when clicking OK I got this message:
Printers - The following error occurred while trying to save your changes. The operation completed successfully. [OK]

An internal error occurred while showing an internal error. You are recommended to exit the workbench.

From Zend ide.

after uninstalling a program i got a message that had no words anywhere but two buttons one said yes and one said no...

When Microsoft first released Windows for Workgroups 3.1 back in the early 1990s, it came with a whole host of silly error messages. The most annoying was just "Oh dear..." which would appear sometimes when you rebooted after a crash. I never found out exactly what caused it.

There was also the great "Something has happened for which there is no error message - this really should not have happened."