Originelle Fehlermeldungen (Was: Zuwenig DOS-Speicher unter WINM95)

Bernward Bretthauer

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Oct 14, 1996, 3:00:00 AM10/14/96

to

>
> Gerald Masan <ma...@iipr00.ifw.uni-hannover.de> wrote:
> Um beim Thema zu bleiben... mein Windows-Lieblingsfehler:
>
> Fatal Error:
> No Error
>
> und Rechner abgestürzt. Den fand ich so schön, habe ich dann gleich
> abphotographiert (er ließ sich leider nicht reproduzieren)
>
Meine Lieblingsfehlermeldung ist immer noch "suicide attempt" unter OS/9.
Sie tritt auf, wenn sich der Stackpointer innerhalb eines Speicherbereichs
befindet, den man an das Betriebssystem zurueckgeben will.

Die folgende Fehlermeldung, die ich letzte Woche vom ftp oder ftpd erhielt,
ist auch nicht schlecht:

221 You could at least say goodbye

Und dann gibt es natuerlich den Klassiker:

Keyboard error, press F1 to resume.

Kennt jemand noch weitere gut Fehlermeldungen?

Bernward Bretthauer

Werner Icking

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Oct 16, 1996, 3:00:00 AM10/16/96

to

In <w53zq1q...@es.go.dlr.de> Bernward Bretthauer <br...@es.go.dlr.de> writes:

>Kennt jemand noch weitere gut Fehlermeldungen?

Mir hat der Kommentar zu einer Fehlermeldung gut gefallen:

Who is General Failure? And why is he reading my disk?

[ General failure reading disk ]

--
Werner Icking Werner...@gmd.de (+49 2241) 14-2443 __o
GMD - Forschungszentrum Informationstechnik GmbH _`\<,_
Schloss Birlinghoven, D-53754 Sankt Augustin, Germany (_)/ (_)
"Der Dativ ist dem Genitiv sein Tod." ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Thomas Roessler

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Oct 16, 1996, 3:00:00 AM10/16/96

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In article <w53zq1q...@es.go.dlr.de>, Bernward Bretthauer wrote:

>Kennt jemand noch weitere gut Fehlermeldungen?

panic("Foooooooood fight!");

-- aus linux/drivers/scsi/aha1542.c.

tlr
--
Thomas Roessler http://www.rhein.de/~roessler/

Christian Weisgerber

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Oct 16, 1996, 3:00:00 AM10/16/96

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Bernward Bretthauer <br...@es.go.dlr.de> writes:

> Kennt jemand noch weitere gut Fehlermeldungen?

Linux v2.0.0, fs/ufs/ufs_super.c:

printk("ufs_read_super: fucking Sun blows me\n");

--
Christian 'naddy' Weisgerber na...@mips.pfalz.de
See another pointless homepage at <URL:http://home.pages.de/~naddy/>.
-- currently reading: William Gibson, Virtual Light --

Gernot Zander

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Oct 16, 1996, 3:00:00 AM10/16/96

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Hi,

in de.alt.folklore.computer Bernward Bretthauer (br...@es.go.dlr.de) wrote:
> Die folgende Fehlermeldung, die ich letzte Woche vom ftp oder ftpd erhielt,
> ist auch nicht schlecht:

> 221 You could at least say goodbye

Ja, die kenne ich auch.

Insbesondere im 1.2.13er Linux waren da neben "Aieee, killing
the interrupt handler!" noch andere schöne Teile drin.
Eben beim Suchen vermisse ich die aber in 2.0.21.

> Und dann gibt es natuerlich den Klassiker:
> Keyboard error, press F1 to resume.

> Kennt jemand noch weitere gut Fehlermeldungen?

Cat faster than mouse error. New mouse required.
Aber der ist "unecht"....

mfg.
Gernot

--
<hi...@scorpio.in-berlin.de> (Gernot Zander)
Wer viel mißt, mißt Mist.

Aldo Valente

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Oct 16, 1996, 3:00:00 AM10/16/96

to

Bernward Bretthauer <br...@es.go.dlr.de> writes:

> Kennt jemand noch weitere gut Fehlermeldungen?

Beim Installieren von "Kings Quest" unter windoof:
[aus'm Kopp]

You have 12 MB Ram.

Kings Quest XY needs at least 8 MB Ram.

You don't have enough Ram.

[ende Installation]

Ich hatte tatsächlich 12 MB.

Aldo

--
Und jetzt bitte keine Diskussion a'la "DOS ist zu blöd". Es hat eben bis
DOS 7.0 keiner den Bedarf nach langen Dateinamen gehabt, und man sollte
nicht glauben, daß inzwischen jedes System hochgerüstet ist, nur weil
irgendweöche freaks unbedingt lange Dateinamen haben wollen.
-- Jochen Ruhland, Message-ID: <51jboo$g...@hrz-ws11.hrz.uni-kassel.de>

Gert Doering

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Oct 16, 1996, 3:00:00 AM10/16/96

to

roes...@sobolev.rhein.de (Thomas Roessler) writes:

>In article <w53zq1q...@es.go.dlr.de>, Bernward Bretthauer wrote:

>>Kennt jemand noch weitere gut Fehlermeldungen?

> panic("Foooooooood fight!");

Lass' mich raten, eine Race Condition? *Goettlich*! :-)))

gert
--
Wege entstehen, wenn wir sie gehen. | gert doering
Vielleicht sollte ich meinen Beobachterposten | ge...@greenie.muc.de
an der Strassenkreuzung aufgeben. | 2:2480/55.4

Robert Frank

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Oct 17, 1996, 3:00:00 AM10/17/96

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-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----

Gilt auch TeX?

In tex.poo z. B.:
Pretend that you're Hercule Poirot: Examine all clues,
and deduce the truth by order and method

oder aus mf.poo:
Pretend that you're Miss Marple: Examine all clues,
and deduce the truth by inspired guesses

Das ist aber nur ein Auszug aus einem ganzen B"undel netter Fehlermeldungen.

Sch"one Gr"usse,

Robert

- --
Dr. Robert Frank; Assistant of the Dean; Dept. of Economics;
University of Munich; phone: ++49 89 2180 6272; fax: ++49 89 2180 6272
snail: Schackstr. 4; D-80539 Munich; FRG
email: u51...@sunmail.lrz-muenchen.de http://www.vwl.uni-muenchen.de/~robert/
public key: finger -l rob...@www.vwl.uni-muenchen.de
PGP fingerprint: 1F A3 41 2A 90 57 A5 57 90 FE A1 6F 4A 77 91 31

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: 2.6.3ia
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Florian Hars

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Oct 17, 1996, 3:00:00 AM10/17/96

to

Décade III, Sextidi de Vendémiaire de l'Année 205 de la Révolution

hi...@scorpio.in-berlin.de (Gernot Zander) writes:
>
> Insbesondere im 1.2.13er Linux waren da neben "Aieee, killing
> the interrupt handler!" noch andere schöne Teile drin.

Ein fehlkonfiguriertes Linux meinte bei mir mal:

"You don't exit. Go away!"

Tschüss, Florian.
--
``Im Usenet ist nämlich die Verwendung der ISO-Kürzel als Namen für
Länder-Hierarchien üblich. Die weltweite deutschsprachige Hierarchie
de.* zu nennen ist damit eine böse und arrogante Okkupierung des
Namensraums.'' - Hauke Möller in de.talk.bizarre

Martin Appel

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Oct 17, 1996, 3:00:00 AM10/17/96

to

Bernward Bretthauer (br...@es.go.dlr.de) wrote:
>
> Und dann gibt es natuerlich den Klassiker:
>
> Keyboard error, press F1 to resume.
>

> Kennt jemand noch weitere gut Fehlermeldungen?
>

Klar, ein echter aus irgendeinem namenlosen MVS-Programm:

"an error occured that should not occur"

(Danke an Karl Henn :-)

und noch ein falscher:

"Insufficient resources in front of screen"

bye
Martin

--
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ \(*)|\
Martin Appel \ +/_\o
mar...@camelot.de \(*)'
ap...@interchip.de \
debv...@ibmmail.com ~~~~~~~~~~Muenchen, Germany~~~~~

Olaf Titz

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Oct 17, 1996, 3:00:00 AM10/17/96

to

Gernot Zander <hi...@scorpio.in-berlin.de> wrote:
> Insbesondere im 1.2.13er Linux waren da neben "Aieee, killing
> the interrupt handler!" noch andere schöne Teile drin.

Interessant sind da die diversen Lautäußerungen ("Oops", "Ouch",
"Aieee"), die allerdings nicht unmittelbar mit verschieden schweren
Fehlern korrelieren. Wer es schafft, sein Root-Device zu unmounten,
bekommt nur ein lakonisches "Prepare for armageddon".

Und dann war da das legendäre "fucking Sun blows me" in der
2.0er-Serie, das aber recht schnell wieder entfernt wurde (hatte was
mit dem Mounten von Sun-Filesystemen zu tun).

olaf
--
___ Olaf...@inka.de or @{stud,informatik}.uni-karlsruhe.de ____
__ o <URL:http://www.inka.de/~bigred/> <IRC:praetorius>
__/<_ >> Just as long as the wheels keep on turning round
_)>(_)______________ I will live for the groove 'til the sun goes down << ____

Lutz Donnerhacke

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Oct 17, 1996, 3:00:00 AM10/17/96

to

u51...@sunmail.lrz-muenchen.de (Robert Frank) writes:
>Gilt auch TeX?

Oder selbstgeschriebenes?

'Fehler beim Stiefeln von Weichscheibengehzeug...'
'Fehler beim Schreibes des Stiefelbereichs.'

'Not enough memory. Please add another MB and press any key to continue.'

'Monitor not found.'

--
| Lutz Donnerhacke +49/3641/380259 voice, -60 ISDN, -61 V.34 und Fax |
| Ich bin Bitschmied und da schwinge ich eben den Bithammer. |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------Wau-+

Mike Heuser

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Oct 17, 1996, 3:00:00 AM10/17/96

to

Sir, von Werner...@gmd.de (Werner Icking) kommt eine Subraumnachricht rein, die am 16.10.1996 um 15:50:44 Uhr,
unter dem Betreff "Re: Originelle Fehlermeldungen (Was: Zuwenig DOS-Speicher unter WINM95)" abgeschickt wurde!
O.K. auf den Schirm!! Und dann wie folgt geantwortet:

> In <w53zq1q...@es.go.dlr.de> Bernward Bretthauer <br...@es.go.dlr.de> writes:
>

> >Kennt jemand noch weitere gut Fehlermeldungen?
>

> Mir hat der Kommentar zu einer Fehlermeldung gut gefallen:
>
> Who is General Failure? And why is he reading my disk?
>
> [ General failure reading disk ]

Im Basic des TI99-4/A gab es mal:

CAN'T DO THAT

... unser Hätz schläät för der FC Kölle ...

--
M.O.D.@Tribal.line.org FIDO: Mike Heuser@2:2433/1496
Mike Heuser, Kölle am Rhing
Escom A500TT 68030/882 <-- Dieser Rechner ist eine Microsoft-freie Zone!

Christoph Lorenz

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Oct 18, 1996, 3:00:00 AM10/18/96

to

Hi,

NT versucht mir auch andauernd klarzumachen, dass ein "unerwarteter
Netzwerkfehler" aufgetreten sei.

Was allerdings ein "erwarteter" Netzwerkfehler waere, dahinter bin ich
bis jetzt noch nicht gekommen.

Ciao
Christoph
--
Private: Christoph Lorenz
E-Mail : lor...@informatik.tu-muenchen.de
WWW : http://www.leo.org/~lorenzc/

Kristian Köhntopp

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Oct 18, 1996, 3:00:00 AM10/18/96

to

ha...@math.uni-hamburg.de (Florian Hars) writes:
>Ein fehlkonfiguriertes Linux meinte bei mir mal:
>"You don't exit. Go away!"

Eigentlich sagte es

kris@black /Net/black/Users/kris/Diplom/tex> strings /usr/ucb/talk | grep exist
You don't exist. Go away.

und genaugenommen war es auch nicht Linux, sondern talk, das das
gesagt hat und in Wirklichkeit sagt talk das nicht nur auf
Linux, sondern auch auf

kris@black /Net/black/Users/kris/Diplom/tex> uname -a
NEXTSTEP 3.2 MC680x0 Lightning5S 0x100c5f2 unknown

so ziemlich jeder Plattform.

unread,

Oct 19, 1996, 3:00:00 AM10/19/96

to

Hi,

Ich fand eben im DOS-Emu vom Linux:
DPMI: Unhandled Exception 0d - Terminating Client
It is likely that dosemu is unstable now and should be rebooted
Loader error (00ff): j

mfg.
Gernot

--
<hi...@scorpio.in-berlin.de> (Gernot Zander)
Hinweis: die Information steckt primaer im schwarzen Teil des
Schwarz/Weiss-Musters auf Deinem Bildschirm, wird als solche jedoch nur
in der spezifischen Abgrenzung gegen Weiss deutlich. (E. Moenkeberg)

Helmut Fromberger

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Oct 19, 1996, 3:00:00 AM10/19/96

to

Martin Appel (mar...@camelot.de) wrote:

> > Kennt jemand noch weitere gut Fehlermeldungen?

> "an error occured that should not occur"

reactor.hf $ ar u god
ar: creating god

ciao,

Helmut

--
/etc/motd/ panic: can't find /
/usr/lib/me/ Helmut Fromberger <h...@reactor.in-passau.de>
/usr/mail/snail/ Kager 1; 94086 Griesbach-Rottal
/usr/lib/me/voice_tape_&_fax/++49-8532-921033

Marcus Herbert

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Oct 20, 1996, 3:00:00 AM10/20/96

to

Bernward Bretthauer <br...@es.go.dlr.de> writes:
> Kennt jemand noch weitere gut Fehlermeldungen?

Hier mal ein Cut&Paste eines Maustreiberaufrufs unter DOS. Wie zu erkennen
ist, handelt es sich um den ESCOM Mousetreiber:

> C:\SYSTEM\ESCOM>mouse
>
> Mouse Treiber-Version 6.20
> Copyright (C) 1990-1994. Alle Rechte Vorbehalten.
>
> Maustreiber installiert: Microsoft Mode
> Maus verbinden mit COM1 (Anschluß: 3F8, IRQ: 04)
> Das Vielfache der Programme für die Auflösungs dynamisches ist Aus

Was meint er bloss? :-)

--
TLA-ISP-users click here /mailto:rho...@rhoen.com/
Find my homepage on |> http://www.franken.de <|
As my mother said: "Don't eat *yellow* snow!"

Gernot Zander

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Oct 20, 1996, 3:00:00 AM10/20/96

to

Hi,

> Die Panics der Unixe sind teilweise recht interessant. Die folgenden
> stammen alle aus dem FreeBSD-Kernel:

> panic("Nobody wants to mount my root for me");
;-)

Vorhin (Linux 2.0.21):
Oct 20 05:42:18 scorpio kernel: lp2 reported invalid error status (on fire, eh?)
Oct 20 05:42:39 scorpio last message repeated 2 times
(Es ist ein Laserdrucker...)

mfg.
Gernot

--
<hi...@scorpio.in-berlin.de> (Gernot Zander)
Gefährlich ist es, wenn Dumme fleißig werden.

Henning Schmiedehausen

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Oct 20, 1996, 3:00:00 AM10/20/96

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fram...@bofh.belwue.de (Ulli Horlacher) writes:

>Lutz Donnerhacke <lu...@as-node.jena.thur.de> wrote:

>> Oder selbstgeschriebenes?

>Auja, dann hab ich auch noch was:
>"Do the tar, man!"

"your fault: core dumped"

... auch ein Klassiker.

Henning

--
Dipl.-Inf. Henning Schmiedehausen - hen...@iconsult.com

ICONSULT Tandogan - Schmiedehausen - Egerer GbR Tel.: +49-9131-9047-12
Memelstrasse 38 - D-91052 Erlangen Fax.: +49-9131-9047-77

Frank Pohl

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Oct 20, 1996, 3:00:00 AM10/20/96

to

ha...@math.uni-hamburg.de (Florian Hars) wrote:

>Ein fehlkonfiguriertes Linux meinte bei mir mal:

>"You don't exit. Go away!"

Das hatte ich auch mal, nachdem ich in /etc versehentlich ein 'rm *'
bewerkstelligt hatte. Danach kam bei jedem Reboot-Versuch nur noch
dieser nette Spruch.

--
Frank

Helmut Fromberger

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Oct 20, 1996, 3:00:00 AM10/20/96

to

Kristian =?ISO-8859-1?Q?K=F6hntopp?= (kr...@koehntopp.de) wrote:

> >Ein fehlkonfiguriertes Linux meinte bei mir mal:
> >"You don't exit. Go away!"

> Eigentlich sagte es

> kris@black /Net/black/Users/kris/Diplom/tex> strings /usr/ucb/talk | grep exist
> You don't exist. Go away.

Moensch....ihr bringt mich hier echt in die Klemme....

reactor.hf $ strings /usr/bin/talk | grep exist

You don't exist. Go away.

This machine doesn't exist. Boy, am I confused!

File exists

Mich gibt`s nicht, meinen Rechner gibt`s auch nicht......
Und meine Kiste ist auch schon ganz durcheinander.

> und genaugenommen war es auch nicht Linux, sondern talk, das das
> gesagt hat und in Wirklichkeit sagt talk das nicht nur auf
> Linux, sondern auch auf

> kris@black /Net/black/Users/kris/Diplom/tex> uname -a

> NEXTSTEP 3.2 MC680x0 Lightning5S 0x100c5f2 unknown

> so ziemlich jeder Plattform.

reactor.hf $ uname -a
A/UX reactor 3.0.2 SVR2 mc68030

ciao,

Helmut

--
/usr/news/gotcha

Aldo Valente

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Oct 21, 1996, 3:00:00 AM10/21/96

to

Thomas hat das Thema eigentlich erschlagen, trotzdem hat es mich noch
an etwas erinnert.( Vieleicht hab ich es sogar in der Liste übersehen)

Es gab auf dem Amiga mal ein kleines nettes Tool.
Dabei war das typische "About".
"About" angeklickt und den üblichen Sermon gelesen.

Darunter zwei Buttons: [GREAT !] und [So what] (in etwas)

Klar, man drueckt auf "So what".

Neues Fenster: "Let us try that again [GREAT !] [So what]"

Marcus Meissner

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Oct 21, 1996, 3:00:00 AM10/21/96

to

In article <54deej$1...@twins.iconsult.com>,

Henning Schmiedehausen <hen...@twins.iconsult.com> wrote:
>"your fault: core dumped"
>
>... auch ein Klassiker.

Ist das nicht aus den BSD fortune cookies? Gabs das jemals real?

> Henning

[QUOTES file durchsuch nach error messages...hmm, keine, aber ein Easter egg:]

The *cutest* Easter egg that I've seen is when you walk up to a PowerMac
with voice recognition and text-to-speech and ask "Are there any Easter
eggs?" and it replies "If there were any, do you think that I would tell you?"
--Lawson English in <3t3hdl$3...@dump.primenet.com>

Marcus
--
http://wwwcip.informatik.uni-erlangen.de/user/msmeissn/index.html

Christian Schlittchen

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Oct 21, 1996, 3:00:00 AM10/21/96

to

Ist ja schon fast alles gesagt, aber einen Klassiker hab ich noch:

~ # strings /usr/sbin/smail

.
.
.
The route-addr hits...
Your mailer feels weeker
The route-addr hits...
___________
/ \
/ R I P \
/ \
/ \
| %s |
| |
| Eaten by a |
| chain letter |
| on level 1 |
| %4d |
*| * * * | *
______)/\/\_//(\/(/\)/\//\/|_)______
.
.
.

--
Christian Schlittchen ( cor...@amber.hb.north.de / cor...@zfn.uni-bremen.de )

Es ist Aufgabe der Zukunft, gefährlich zu sein.
-- Alfred N. Whitehead

Thomas Koenig

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Oct 21, 1996, 3:00:00 AM10/21/96

to

Subject: The Canonical List of Error Messages

>From Version 7 UNIX: "Values of B will give rise to dom."

(no, I don't know what it meant (or if it still exists!)
but it had something to do with removing a directory with
a name beginning with '.'.)
--
/
/ Jerry CalmaSD UNIX SysAdmin +1 619 587-3065
/

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Actually, my all-time favorite is:

FATAL system error #nnnn
CAUSE: We should never get here!

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: do...@hpmwtd.HP.COM (Don Dillon)

my favorite happened while i was transfering a file from one
machine to another. after about five minutes the machine still
hasn't copied the file and responds with....

OHHHH.... I give up
>
>Core dumped

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: se...@fido.morgan.com (Seth Breidbart)

In article <7...@mgt3.sci.UUCP> d...@sci.UUCP (D. C. Sessions) writes:
>Actually, my all-time favorite is:
>
>FATAL system error #nnnn
>CAUSE: We should never get here!
>

My favorite is the PL/1 compiler message

"COMPILER UNABLE TO ABORT"

This is the message when the compiler has attempted to abort the compilation
five times, and has failed each time.

I don't know what happens next.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: nom...@rimfaxc.diku.dk (Ole Nomann Thomsen)

This is what the Univac 2200's os1100 os produces, when I fill my
program file beyond its capacity:

I/O TYPE 01 CODE 22 CONT 12 REENT ADR: 015245 BDI: 403034
PACKET ADR 045301
AN ATTEMPT WAS MADE TO WRITE BEYOND THE MAXIMUM ASSIGNED SPACE
FOR A MASS STORAGE FILE. AN ATTEMPT WAS MADE TO EXPAND A MASS
STORAGE FILE BEYOND THE MAXIMUM ASSIGNED SPACE. A READ
FUNCTION FOR A MASS STORAGE FILE SPECIFIED AN ADDRESS (WORD 5
OF THE I/O PACKET) THAT IS BEYOND THE MAXIMUM ASSIGNED SPACE.
A READ OR WRITE FUNCTION FOR A WORD-ADDRESSABLE MASS STORAGE
FILE SPECIFIED A MASS STORAGE ADDRESS (WORD 5 OF THE I/O
PACKET) AND A TOTAL DATA COUNT. WHEN THE MASS STORAGE ADDRESS
IS ADDED TO THE TOTAL DATA COUNT, THE RESULTING ENDING MASS
STORAGE ADDRESS IS GREATER THAN 2*/35-1. A READ OR WRITE
FUNCTION FOR A SECTOR-FORMATTED MASS STORAGE FILE SPECIFIED A
MASS STORAGE ADDRESS (WORD 5 OF THE I/O PACKET) THAT IS
GREATER THAN 2*/30-1. ADI ONLY: REFERENCE ATTEMPTED BEYOND THE
ASSIGNED FILE WHEN THE FILE IS CONFIGURED AS A FH-432 OR
FH-1782 DRUM.
(Filename: FEK*ONT)
END MAP. ERRORS: 1 TIME: 33.978 STORAGE: 054203/014304/035416/3/0220776
ERR$ TYPE 03 CODE 00 CONT 12 REENT ADR: 045147 BDI: 000015
USER EXECUTED ER ERR$.

The fun thing is that the err.msg.s are usually more like:
I/O TYPE 01 CODE 22 CONT 12 REENT ADR: 015245 BDI: 403034

and a register dump.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: j...@spyy00.UUCP (Jeff Anderson)

My favorite error message that I have *INCLUDED* in a program was:
ERROR: A really big FUCK UP has been detected !!

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: in...@donner.SanDiego.NCR.COM (Robert (Bob) Insko)

Disk drive error codes:

Momentaraly writing while seeking
Constantly writing while seeking
Momentaraly writing while reading
....

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: ee53...@hydra.unm.edu (Duke McMillan n5gax)

If you run "strings" on the executable of gawk (the messdos version, at
least), you'll see a line with this message:

initstate: not enough state (%d bytes) with which to do jack; ignored.

I've no idea how to get gawk (GNU awk) to spit out this message, but it
appeals, somehow....

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: ri...@pogo.WV.TEK.COM (Rick Clements)

We have a PC clone with a flakey keyboard. It often produces the error
message "Keyboard not present, press any key"

A friend of mine in a compiler writing class produced a compiler with one
error message "you lied to me when you told me this was a program"

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: ric...@pyrtech.pyramid.com (Richard Clark)

My favorite was "PROGRAMMER GOOFED . . . YOU SHOULD NEVER SEE THIS MESSAGE"

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: msjo...@ensub.Wichita.NCR.COM (Mark Johnson)

When I was at Purdue, the IE department had a DG Nova system that would respond
to attempts to run object programs formatted for a DG Eclipse system with the
message:

YOU CAN'T DO THAT!

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: ha...@blackjack.dt.navy.mil (Michael Hart)

A library automation package I once worked on had the message:

Man the Lifeboats! Women and children first! ....

Management was not amused when the first customer called in for
support with this message. :-)

No sense of humor, some of those mgt. types!

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: ph...@hprmokg.HP.COM (Phil Nielsen)

Okay, I know this isn't rec.games.trivia, but...

Can someone tell me the machine and editor which, when instructed to

MAKE WAR

would respond with

MAKE LOVE NOT WAR

(no, I don't know the answer; someone told me about this one once)

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: dav...@montagar.lonestar.org (David L. Cathey, SYSOP)

It's TECO, on VAX/VMS, and goes like this:

$ make :== $ sys$system:teco32 make
$ make love
Not war?
*

Long live TECO!!!

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: ch...@imagine.ADMS-RAD.Unisys.COM (Chris Sterritt)

Here are some that I found in reading the string-pool from Knuth's TeX:
[Note that I included these from the actual file, so the one with 'can
fix can fix' below is what's actually there!]

(That makes 100 errors; please try again.)

You can now delete more, or insert, or whatever.

Sorry, I don't know how to help in this situation.
Maybe you should try asking a human?

Sorry, I already gave what help I could...

An error might have occurred before I noticed any problems.

``If all else fails, read the instructions.''

This can't happen.

I'm broken. Please show this to someone who can fix can fix

I can't go on meeting you like this.

One of your faux pas seems to have wounded me deeply...
in fact, I'm barely conscious. Please fix it and try again.

Interruption
You rang?

IMPOSSIBLE.

NONEXISTENT.

ETC.

BAD.

A funny symbol that I can't read has just been input.
Continue, and I'll forget that it ever happened.

I suspect you've forgotten a `}', causing me to apply this
control sequence to too much text. How can we recover?
My plan is to forget the whole thing and hope for the best.

I dddon't go any higher than filll.

Dimensions can be in units of em, ex, in, pt, pc,
cm, mm, dd, cc, bp, or sp; but yours is a new one!
I'll assume that you meant to say pt, for printer's points.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: fax...@uoft02.utoledo.edu

If things go amiss in Interactive Data Language, as they frequently do,
you get :

Something Rotten in Denmark, Interp Stack Not ALigned

just before the core dumps.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: s...@grebyn.com (Stephen G. Smith)

My own favorite, from one of DEC's less successful versions of the RT11
linker:

<Assorted DEC ID fruitcake> ILLEGAL ERROR

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: d...@owm2.Eng.Sun.COM (Kenneth Dye [Contractor])

My first 'C' class was under 4.1 BSD. I forgot to name my
first program with a ".c" suffix; hence the following error message:

% cc prog1
ld: bad magic number

which was a bit confusing to a person who didn't know
about magic numbers or what even 'ld' was....

Then there is my favourite, 'sail', who asks for a scenario
number from a list; if anything but a valid digit is input, 'sail'
simply says "very funny" and exits.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: ri...@pogo.WV.TEK.COM (Rick Clements)

The most common error message we got from a modula II compiler that I used
at an other company was "Unexpected ';', expecting ';'"

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: dmu...@copper.WR.TEK.COM (David Munroe)

The early versions of TeX had this classic, which I believe the people at
Stanford even had printed on T-shirts:

You can't do that in horizontal mode.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: c...@dbase.A-T.COM (Cy Shuster)

My favorite was on the (gasp!) IBM 7094. Occasionally, the COBOL
compiler would die with just:

"COMPILER THWARTED".

This was in '74. I remember, because we had a tenth anniversary
party for the compiler (printed a date in '64 at the top of each
listing).

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: jens...@skinfaxe.diku.dk (Jens Tingleff)

ri...@pogo.WV.TEK.COM (Rick Clements) writes:

>We have a PC clone with a flakey keyboard. It often produces the error
>message "Keyboard not present, press any key"

In which case it's not really compaible. *The* message is

"Keyboard error or no keyboard present. Press F1 to continue."

Pull the keyboard lead out of an IBM (while power of), power on and
laaaaugh.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: BAE...@psuvm.psu.edu (Lemming)

A program called "junk" written by a student here at PSU gives the
following error message:

"Argument is bletchful."

On the Commodore Amiga, system crashes are always indicated by a black
window with a red flashing border at the top of the screen with the
words "Guru Meditation" and a number.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: s...@grebyn.com (Stephen G. Smith)

This is probably just another Urban Legend, but ...

A large company had just gotten their first Macintosh. As Macs do, it
had a system crash, and popped up a window with a picture (uhh, excuse
me, icon :-) of a bomb on it.

Management ordered the building evacuated. And called the police ...

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: r...@fico2.UUCP (The OTHER Rick Adams)

Doing a strings on our version of lint yields this error message; I have
no idea how to get it to spit out... stack overflow, maybe?

"lint's little mind is blown."

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: BAXT...@wehi.dn.mu.oz

And a graph plotting program on the Amiga uses the red box with:

"Hot Damn! You need more ram!"

When it runs out of memory.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: url...@smurf.sub.org (Matthias Urlichs)

Not to mention the MPW C compiler (not all of these may be funny to all of you):

String literal too long (I let you have 512 characters, that's 3 more than
ANSI said I should)

....And the lord said, 'lo, there shall only be case or default labels
inside a switch statement'

a typedef name was a complete surprise to me at this point in your program

You can't modify a constant, float upstream, win an argument with the IRS, or
satisfy this compiler

This struct already has a perfectly good definition

type in (cast) must be scalar; ANSI 3.3.4; page 39, lines 10-11 (I know you
don't care, I'm just trying to annoy you)

Can't cast a void type to type void (because the ANSI spec. says so, that's
why)

Huh ?

can't go mucking with a 'void *'

we already did this function

This label is the target of a goto from outside of the block containing this
label AND this block has an automatic variable with an initializer AND your
window wasn't wide enough to read this whole error message

Call me paranoid but finding '/*' inside this comment makes me suspicious

Symbol table full - fatal heap error; please go buy a RAM upgrade from your
local Apple dealer

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: ema...@digi.lonestar.org (Edgar Martinez Martinez)

I just got this error message while trying to spell-check a document:

"It seem you are trying to check the output from a word-processor. Not
only does this not make sense, but you would probably damage the file
if you tried so I am not going to let you do this!"

Well, what if I wanted to damage it!!!

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: dfr...@ic.sunysb.edu (David W Fraser)

Well just now while switching newsgroups i got this message:

It looks like the active file is messed up. Contact your news administrator
and leave the "bogus" groups alone, and they may come back to normal. Maybe.
^^^^^
----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: fel...@eng3.UUCP (Ed Felton)

This one is not exactly an error message story, but it's close, so here goes:

Our department is currently developing a Diagnostics package for IBM-PC boxes,
and as one of our intermediate INTERNAL releases, we added a new menu, with
help screen etc, for a set of functions we were about to add. It went through
the normal internal review cycle, with the Dept head spending some time looking
at it as well. Unknown to us, the dept head shipped a copy to a customer to
get their comments. The memo we got back from the customer was quite funny,
and I quote:

The SYSTEM UTILITY menu functions have not been implemented. Therefore
no comments for this. Help for this menu is somebody's idea of a joke!
I can only assume the help will be changed when the menu functions have
been completed

The dept head had never looked at any of the help menus, so he didn't know
what was going on. When he came back to us to find out what the problem was
this is what he found:

Attention K-Mart shoppers: Blue Light special in out SYSTEM UTILITIES
department. for the next 10 days we will be taking requests for the
utilities that you think should be here. Thank you again for shopping
K-Mart.

Needless to say, the dept head was P-Oed, but he ignored the

INTERNAL USE ONLY
disclaimer we had put with the software.

probably not funny, just wierd

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: cr...@bnr-rsc.UUCP (Bill Crick)

Error messages I've seen:

"Things are not looking good!"

"I didn't think this set of error conditions could ever happen"

"Now deleting all files. Goodbye" Then read a directory in order to make the
hard drive rattle!

When I was new to UNIX -> "file qwerty.asdfg has bad magic."
sounds like a real OS, no rinkydink stuff here?

And I knew some guys that were writing some SW to be used by local
clerical staff, and they got to a this should never happen, but we should
put in a message. Someone said the only person that could ever get into
this deep a mess is Linda, so they put a message that said
"Hi Linda! We wondered how long it would take, for you to mess up this bad."
Well sure enough, six months later,
Linda comes storming in mad as a wet hen, having discovered
that error message.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: and...@earwax.pd.mwa.oz.au (Andrew Williams)

One amusing error message that I've seen is produced when you try to
restart the 'nnmaster' news program with the -k option. This should kill
the existing nnmaster so you can restart a new one- But if things go
wrong, you get the message "The running master will not die..."!!

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: bsm...@pluto.osf.org (Bruce Smith)

In article <33...@bnr-rsc.UUCP> cr...@bnr-rsc.UUCP (Bill Crick) writes:
>
>Error messages I've seen:
>
>"Things are not looking good!"
>
>"I didn't think this set of error conditions could ever happen"
>

This would have been a good one; unfortunately, it got caught before
the software went out (last place I worked):

"Shut 'er down, Clancy, she's a-pumpin' mud!"

The perpetrator, to my knowledge, was not found.

Bruce Smith

x

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: jp...@cunixb.cc.columbia.edu (Jay P. Lessler)

An error has occured on the error logging device.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: fax...@uoft02.utoledo.edu

I ran a program once which had a menu of commands, including one
to get help. If you pressed the help key you got:

"Out of order"

Very helpful!
In a simialr program, if you typed in an invalid command you got either

"Hey are you talking to me? Try again!"
or
"Invalid command. Feel ashamed for yourself and try again."
or
"Of all the commands available you picked the wrong one!"

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: z...@savage.UUCP (Zap Savage)

In article <13...@paperboy.OSF.ORG> bsm...@pluto.osf.org (Bruce Smith) writes:
>"Shut 'er down, Clancy, she's a-pumpin' mud!"

I've never seen this error occur, but I noticed while hacking graphics
routines into the Z80 portion of Radio Shack's (Microsoft's) TRS-80 Model 16
M68000 Xenix. (Note that for a while, this computer supported the largest
Unix (-like) base in the world).

The Z80 handled all the of the IO in the machine and somewhere imbedded in
the code was the message "Shut her down, Scotty, she's sucking mud again!"

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: jcmo...@mwunix.mitre.ORG (Joe Morris)

Back in the dark ages (1967 or so) I rewrote a large part of the IBFTC
Fortran compiler for the IBM 7040 to add in most of the goodies which
were becoming available in compilers for other machines. (The primary
models I used were S/360 FORTRAN G and the Sigma 7 Fortran, but I
stole ideas wherever I could.) Keeping track of the data within the
compiler was a complex chore (at the time I was in grad school, and
I was the only staffer on the project...can you say "long hours"?)

I wrote in numerous checks on the internal procedures, but didn't have
much in the way of recovery code if inconsistent data were detected
except to abort with an error message. I swiped the error message from
a GE system; as I wrote it the text was:

ERROR 1164 HOW IN THE HELL DID YOU GET HERE

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: d...@thrush.mlb.semi.harris.com (Don Lewis)

Here are a few gems from our Harris VOS system.

We got used to seing this one a lot.

JOBCNTRL ER 512 : WARNING: FILE GENERATED.
>he 512
THE FILE WHICH WAS SPECIFIED AS THE 'COPY TO' OR DESTINATION FILE WAS
NOT THERE AND WAS THEREFORE GENERATED BY JOBCONTROL. IF YOU DID NOT
MEAN TO COPY TO A NEW FILE ELIMINATE THE FILE.

The next few are pretty amusing.

JOBCNTRL ER 76 : NO ACCESS FOR $TOAD SERVICE
>he 76
A USER PROGRAM MADE A CALL TO A $TOAD SERVICE AND THE USER DOES NOT HAVE
THE PROPER ACCESS TO BIT TO USE THAT SERVICE. ACCESS RESTRICTIONS
ARE PLACED ON THE $TOADS SERVICES IN GENERAL, AND $CPRIOR, $PABORT,
AND $SUSP FOR INDIVIDUAL RESTRICTIONS.

JOBCNTRL ER 2167 : NO ACCESS TO VULCANIZE PROGRAM
>he 2167
AN ATTEMPT HAS BEEN MADE TO VULCANIZE A REAL-TIME, MONITOR, OR NRH
TYPE PROGRAM, OR A PROGRAM WITH HIGH ACCESS, ACCOUNTING FILE ACCESS,
OR SUB-SYSTEM ACCESS. THE VULCANIZE REQUEST IS IGNORED BECAUSE THE
USER DOES NOT HAVE ACCESS TO GENERATE SUCH A PROGRAM.

JOBCNTRL ER 2211 : IT'S NOT NICE TO FOOL POP!
>he 2211
YOU JUST TRIED TO FAKE-OUT MOTHER NATURE, AND SHE CAUGHT YOU! SUPER-
VULCAN NOW HAS YOUR NAME ON HIS ENEMY LIST, AND YOU CAN BE CERTAIN THAT
FUTURE ATTEMPTS TO RESOURCE LFN 0,3,OR 6 WILL RESULT IN YOUR BEING
ABORTED, SPINDLED, MANGLED, FOLDED, PUNCHED, DELETED, AND DEALLOCATED.

This last message was often the cause of a sinking feeling late at
night.

JOBCNTRL ER 44 : PROGRAM FILE DESTROYED.
>he 44
THE PROGRAM HAS BEEN ABORTED DUE TO INCONSISTENCIES IN THE INFORMATION
GENERATED BY THE VULCANIZER. THE DISC COPY OF THE PROGRAM MAY HAVE BEEN
DESTROYED OR THE PROGRAM MAY NOT HAVE BEEN RE-VULCANIZED AFTER A MAJOR
SYSTEM RELEASE. IN ANY CASE RE-VULCANIZE THE PROGRAM (RLIBS ALSO).

Fortunately I don't have use this machine anymore :-) :-) :-)

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: grayt@spock (Tom Gray)

>From the telephone switch world -

Outputs required from the ALARM SYSTEM
minor alarm
major alarm
critical alarm

alarm system failure alarm

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: pat@cscnj (Patrick Hester)

Trailblazer for the Atari ST has a good one.
You press the [Help] key and the machine laughs at you.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: twpi...@amherst.bitnet (Tim Pierce)

A friend of mine screwed up somehow when he installed Windows 3.0 on his 386
running DOS 4.01, and now he can hardly run the damn thing without receiving
the following ominous-sounding declaration:

This application has violated system integrity and must be terminated.

No one at Microsoft seems to have heard of it.

Also, I've been told that on VMS, if you attempt to send out e-mail with an
invalid header, it will respond with "You are a charlatan."

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: kgb...@cs.rit.edu (Brayton Kevin Grant)

Here's another one:

Occasionally our ultrix system will forget who you are and if you want
to "talk" to another user, the talk daemon will come back with

Go away. You don't exist.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

My OS (QNX) has a command called TSK (short for TASK) which allows you to
view information to do with tasks (code size, id's, son, dad, etc) when
I first saw it a friend of mine showed me the list of commands, of which
one is tsk tsk, I tried it, and it came up with the following message:

Tsk tsk? Have I been a bad computer?

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: l...@sm.luth.se (Johan Persson)

When I tried to compile a program, (which had compiled nice
on a SUN workstation with both gcc and cc) on one of our old
VAX 11/750 I got the fantastic error

.. line 2706 compiler error: schain botch

(4.3 BSD and cc)

Does anyone have any clue to what that means ?

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: p...@ama-1.ama.caltech.edu (Paul Hardy)

In an earlier version of BSD (4.1?) if you did [I think it was a] "who" and
you were the only one on the system, it would print something like

Are you lonely?

Anyone have a better memory of this than I do?

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: cd5...@mars.njit.edu (David Charlap)

I remember my old TRS-80 Color Computer. It only had 2-letter
abbrevisations for all errors. The one for "file not open" when
you tried to read/write a file was:

?NO ERROR

It amused me when it happened.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: do...@hpmwtd.HP.COM (Don Dillon)

I got an error message on time while I was copying a file, and the
system seemed to be hung up. Just as I was going to attempt to abort
out the machine came back.

oh........ I give up.... dumping core now!

and the damn thing did !!!!!

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: d...@gorgon.uucp (Daniel A. Glasser)

When I was working at Mark Williams Company, I had a midnight project to
take the Atari-ST version of make and put much of the shell functionality
(as far as command line parsing, wild card expansion, and a few built-in
functions) and 'cc' into the make executable, thereby improving the speed
of builds and such. I never did finish this, but I changed the standard
$ make love
Not war?
...
to
$ make love
For heavens sake, doesn't anyone just talk anymore?
...
and considered adding a random selection of other comments, like
Not tonight, I've got a headache.
I beg your pardon?
Your place or mine?
Maybe someone else has managed to hide something like this into a
commercial package.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: d...@gorgon.uucp (Daniel A. Glasser)

When I was in college the entire school was using a single PDP-11/40
under RSTS/E. We had somewhere around 20 DECwriter II's (LA36's) for
use by the students in various places around the campus. One evening
I encountered a terrified beginning FORTRAN student who had encountered
a bug in the FortranIV compiler we were running at the time. Something like:

FORTRAN FATAL INTERNAL ERROR
FATAL COMPILER DAMAGE REPORT FOLLOWS

followed by a page and a half of register and stack dump info. This
student was convinced that he'd broken the compiler, and that he'd be
in big trouble for breaking the compiler for everyone else.

At another point that year, (April 1) someone (I won't say who) edited the
system error message file.

?Invalid Character At Terminal -- Please Go Away
?Unibus timeout -- send in a new quarterback
?Ouch, That HURTS!

And other gems. The computer center manager was not thrilled.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: p...@megatest.UUCP (Patrick Powers)

I worked on a UNIX system that had an editor called e. Once entered
it took control of the screen and required some highly unlikely sequence
of key strokes to exit. It was fairly easy to type e by accident so
to avoid this annoying fate some fellow aliased e to the message
You must be joking.
One day an e user decided to use his terminal and got a surprise.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: ku...@tc.fluke.COM (Kurt Guntheroth)

> "Error: Error ocurred when attempting to print error message."

I once blew away my VMS shell process by redefining the standard error file
SYS$ERROR (I think, it's been awhile). You execute the command and things
are fine, then you run your pascal program which dies with an error printed
to PAS$ERROR. PAS$ERROR is assigned to SYS$ERROR, which is assigned to
something invalid. The OS wants to tell you that the error channel is
invalid, and what does it try to do? Print on SYS$ERROR. At this point, I
got a hexadecimal register dump(!!) and blown off the system. And this was
on a "commercial" OS. How graceful.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: far...@sat.com (Michael J. Farren)

cd5...@mars.njit.edu writes:

>"Error #1: Power supply not found"

Or my favorite real error message, found in the User's Manual for the Atari
800 computer, which produced only numbers for errors, so you had to look up
the translation in the manual:

ERROR 0: POWER NOT ON

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: fma...@hermes.ladc.bull.com (Frank Mayhar)

Shortly after I started work at the Stephen F. Austin State University computer
center as a support person, we had a coed come in with a very strange problem.
She had been trying to do her FORTRAN homework, and had run across a bug in the
FORTRAN compiler (ANSF on Honeywell CP-V). On her printout was some diagnostic
information, followed by the words:

Break Rob's knuckles.

I've always wondered who Rob was, and what he did wrong.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: r...@karl.cs.su.OZ.AU (A Stainless Steel Rat)

In article <1991Feb22.2...@servalan.uucp> rmt...@servalan.uucp (Richard
Todd) writes:

>I think it was a remark in the BUGS section of the manpage for tunefs(8),
>something along the lines of "You can tune a filesystem, but you can't tuna
>fish"... Alas, all I can check right now is the Apple Unix man pages, which
>seem to have had the fishy witticisms excised. :-(.

The unix system we used at this university a few years back had two strange man
entries that went something like:

$ man fish

would give you:

Don't say "fish", Bishop. It doesn't mean anything.

and

$ man overboard

would give you:

# # ####### # ###### ###
# # # # # # ###
# # # # # # ###
####### ##### # ###### #
# # # # #
# # # # # ###
# # ####### ####### # ###

BUGS: No life raft

raf

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: rob...@edsews.eds.com (Ted Roberts)

In article <91049.154...@psuvm.psu.edu>, DSB...@psuvm.psu.edu (David Barr)
writes:
> My personal favorite: "Oops! Error while handling error!"
> (a concurrent C compiler)

My favorites were from the older Apollo OS's, two of the systems errors
were (I believe I remember them correctly):

Can't find wicked faraway objects.
and
Can't fit 27" tape through 25" door.

These were actually given in response to a request for meaning from
the stcode.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: s...@data.com (Steven M. Boker)

In article <27c11888@ralf> Ralf....@B.GP.CS.CMU.EDU writes:
>}On the venerable Model I Trash-80, the DOS had a vector reserved for what the
>}manual listed as "Unprintable Error". The exact meaning was never defined.

The MSDOS 1.0 manuals had a listing for "Invalid Error".
Talk about getting it wrong.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: ha...@ecs.umass.edu

error messages. get this one (today, friday, MARCH FIRST, 1991) our mainframe
decided not to allow logins.

why was that?

Nobody was validated for access on february 29th, 1991 (btw, what day of the
week was that?!)

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: sc...@bbxsda.UUCP (Scott Amspoker)

In article <525@bria> uunet!bria!mike writes:
>[ in regards to the expression "if (a = b)" instead of "if (a == b)" ]
>
>Think *lint*. IMHO, there is nothing we need less than a compiler spitting
>out more useless verbage.

The only problem with that is that many PC based C compilers don't include
a lint program. It makes sense that the programmer at least have the option
of enabling various warning messages. Strangely enough, I once comitted
the exact opposite mistake. I had a C statement like this:

i == j;

The compiler (bless its little heart) gave me the warning:

"code has no effect"

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: twpi...@amherst.bitnet (Tim Pierce)

(Sorry if this is a well-known one. I'm new to Unix.)

Just to rehash an old thread... Today, I accidentally sent an empty mail
message, and Ultrix said, "No message, no subject; hope that's ok."

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: umpf...@ccu.umanitoba.ca (Mike Pfaiffer)

Here is another first time post to the net. Hope it meets with your
approval...

I was learning PL/1 a couple years ago and for our first or second
assignment we had to split one file into two files based on the first char
on the line. The program compiled correctly and I even got output of sorts.
The result was the following line...

I the most critical examiner of all have determined that there is an error on
line 42.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: da...@kessner.denver.co.us (David Kessner)

Computers running a DTK BIOS report a parity error as:

Parity Error But Segment Doesn't Found

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: w...@cs.ULowell.EDU (Paul Wexelblat)

Then there was level D of TOPS (before DEC gave releases numbers, and
TOPS was the PDP-10 OP Sys; there was no TOPS-10 (or even Texex yet)).

MORE CORE AVAILABLE, BUT NOT FOR YOU

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: j...@sequent.com (Jeff Berkowitz)

I love these. In the SunOS 3.0 source code, somewhere in the VM
system I think, there was a line that said:

panic ("Shannon and Bill say this can't happen");

I saw this one for myself, in 1986, working for a now-defunct company
that was a Sun source licensee at the time. (Saw it in the source,
that is - never saw it happen :-).

...

A DEC oldtimer told me that a DEC-10 once printed

PUNT

after a particularly misguided attempt to get it to boot, is this
one apocryphal?

Does anyone collect these things?

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: ke...@skyler.arc.ab.ca (Ken Wallewein)

I've heard -- or read, I think -- about some code that contained the comment
"you aren't expected to understand this". Seems to me it was in TCP/IP.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: jber...@medar.com (Jeffrey A. Bertoia)

In article <KENW.91Ju...@skyler.arc.ab.ca> ke...@skyler.arc.ab.ca (Ken Wall
ewein) writes:
>I've heard -- or read, I think -- about some code that contained the comment
>"you aren't expected to understand this". Seems to me it was in TCP/IP.
>/kenw

The Whitesmiths 'C' manual had a line like that in the bugs section
of the manual page after a particulary harrowing description of,
as I remember, an internal function.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: ar...@bass.bu.edu (Michael Ardai)

>From article <KENW.91Ju...@skyler.arc.ab.ca>, by ke...@skyler.arc.ab.ca (Ke
n Wallewein):
> I've heard -- or read, I think -- about some code that contained the comment
> "you aren't expected to understand this". Seems to me it was in TCP/IP.

Deep inside the Teradyne hardware modeler code is a routine that feeds a
whole bunch of hex numbers into a SYS$QIO call. The only comment is
'Weird magic happens here'.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: wha...@wookumz.gnu.ai.mit.edu (....What Is?....)

I don't collect these things, but I have one to add, and I'm hoping
someone has an Earthly explanation for it. This happened on a
VAX 11/750 running 4.3 BSD. We've all seen the "You have new mail."
message after the csh prompt, but ONCE it actually said instead
"Thou hast new mail." It's only happened once! And I swear it
happened! Has anyone else ever seen this? I don't even know what
triggered it!

--
Steve Boswell | This opinion is distributed in the hopes that it
wha...@ucsd.edu | will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY...
wha...@gnu.ai.mit.edu |

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: gn...@kauri.vuw.ac.nz (Nathan Torkington)

Aaah, but then I want to know about *these* strings, found
(here) in /usr/local/bin/mail:

Too much "sourcing" going on.
Okie dokie
Mail's idea of conditions is screwed up
~h: no can do!?
Too many regrets
detract asked to insert commas
metoo
Somethings amiss -- no @ or % in arpafix
Made up bad net name
ubluit
Who are you!?
; why =

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: fis...@qut.edu.au

The Algol compiler for the ICL 1900 used very occasionally collapse with
the message:

"The impossible has happened!"

Bill

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: kfi...@hubcap.clemson.edu (Kevin Fitzpatrick)

In <16...@cvbnetPrime.COM> mkam...@cvbnet.prime.com (mailhost) writes:
>Anyway it was a Tandy 6000 (their successor to the Tandy 16)
>running XENIX (a beta version I believe). The memory has gotten
>a little foggy over the years, but I recall the wording as:

> panic: Z80 panic: shut her down Scotty, she's sucking mud again.

Tandy was big on the hidden Trek messages. On of their TRS-80 6.x
upgrades had an ASCII quote buried way out on an unused track.
Something like...

Beam me up Scotty, there's no life out here.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: kl...@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu (Charley Kline)

Gavin....@comp.vuw.ac.nz (Gavin Flower) writes:
>Well anyway... I often used the Algol compiler on a B6700 mainframe
>and sometimes got the message:

> "NO ERRORS DETECTED".

>I rather thoght this was a more honest message than other conpilers
>gave! I felt it was not so subtle hint that one should not be
>complacent!

The VS/PASCAL compiler under VM/CMS (there, that's two V's already and I
haven't even gotten to the real point yet) goes one step further in compiler
honesty. If your program compiles successfully, it will issue

NO COMPILER DETECTED ERRORS.

I swear I can see the italicization on the words "COMPILER DETECTED."

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: car...@cs.uiuc.edu (Alan M. Carroll)

Epoch has a few funny messages in it for disasterous circumstances.
Some of them are:

"Holy Panes Batman, the window's missing!" - when a X window structure
isn't there.

"Holy PH, Batman, the buffer's missing!" - a window without a buffer.
This one has actually been seen outside the lab.

"Holy Vectors Batman, I can't get more lines!" - malloc failed.

The error message I want to put in, but never have had the chance, is
"System Error - Sureness out of Bounds". You PLATO heads know what I
mean.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: sta...@otago.ac.nz (Nigel Stanger)

Expressionist (a Mac application for doing equations) has the
following error messages in it:

Mysterious Error -nnn

Internal Error: Illegal hedge TV number. (huh?? what?!)

Internal Error: BlinkThere or HiliteThere messed up.

Bad External File System: Boy, is your system messed up. :)

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: d...@think.com (Dave Mankins)

Honeywell's customer service department once got a very concerned
message from a confused customer whose MULTICS system had printed:

Hodie natus est radici frater

before giving up the (holy?) ghost. ``Today unto the root is born a
brother''.

This is a hack on ``Hodie natus est filius nobis'', or ``Today unto us
is born a son''. I don't know the reference exactly, but it's in
Handel's Messiah.

It seems a Multics hacker (allegedly Bernie Greenberg) at MIT had
inserted the liturgical allusion when it detected the ``impossible
event'' of the filesystem deciding it had two roots.

[Greenberg is also known for having taken notes in Latin (``for
clarity and precision'') when in the fever dream induced by first
exposure to a Rubik's Cube.]

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: BU...@livid.uib.no

In the IRC-server there are some "nice" messages, and here's a coupple of them:

Looks like mere mortals are trying to enter the Twilight Zone
FATAL: Major security hack. Notify Administrator.
Identity problems, eh ?
Bad Craziness
'tis is no game for mere mortals
Go away and get a life
Death before dishonour ?
Dave, don't do that...
Good afternoon, gentelman, I'm a HAL 9000 Computer
Only few mortals may try to enter the Twiligth Zone
Only real wizzards know the spells to open the gate of paradize
Trying to unlock the door twice eh ?
Use the force, Luke !
Change balls, please

My favorite is definitivly the "Bad Craziness" ... :-)

/Ruben

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: BJG...@auvm.american.edu (bj gleason)

On an old Perkin-Elmer Machine, the Pascal Compiler would say:

"NONE of your errors have been found"

The compiler was smart enough to know that your program had errors anyway :-)

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: grey...@unisoft.UUCP (The Grey Wolf)

Now, granted, this is something one of us here did, but our VAX precedes
its panics with the message

"Well, you ran into something and the game is over."

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: jh...@panix.com (John Hawkinson)

My favorite RSTS/E error message is "Unused error message #xxx". Somehow
I managed to get these when hitting ^C as a certain program loads.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: ke...@skyler.arc.ab.ca (Ken Wallewein)

Take this for what it's worth, but at a shop where I once worked, an
overnight processing run would sometime fail with the error message:

"FALL DOWN GO BOOM"

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: tb...@watsol.waterloo.edu (Tim Bray)

Well, this is just a story, picked up from the early days of Usenet, so it's
possibly unfounded and furthermore some folks have likely already seen it,
but it gave me days of snickers.

Story goes that that some little text-edit subsystem of something or other
which had very few things that could go wrong had only one error message,
used for both user and internal errors:

Data potato doo-wop doo-wop

When pressed for an explanation, the programmer said: "well, I figured
it hd to print *something* when there was an error."

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: j...@cs.HUT.FI (Jyrki Kuoppala)

> When you type your mail and type ~C (typo for ~c) my unix mail tells me:
>
> Okie dokie, core dumped.

bash$ cat > x.c
main() { execl ("/bin/mail", 0); }
^D
bash$ gcc x.c
bash$ ./a.out
puke
bash$

//Jyrki

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: mkam...@cvbnet.prime.com (Mark B. Kaminsky)

On the old NCR Towers I used to get the following message on the
console whenever someone on a terminal would hold down the left
(or right - I forget which) arrow key:

spurious multibus interrupt

It took us a long time to figure out what was causing the messages
since nothing else bad happened and the people on the terminals
would be looking at their own screens while typing. Anyone on the
console, on the other hand, would look at the process table for
suspicious processes, etc.

NCR took the bug report with a great deal of disbelief, but their next
release of UNIX didn't have the problem.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: bhou...@hopi.intel.com (Blair P. Houghton)

I predict that Eighth Generation computers
will compile no programs, run no applications,
and access no data. Instead they will be
designed and tuned to give a continuously
variable spectrum of elegant and precise
error messages describing your failure to
induce them to do so.

--Blair
"And I'm not even married..."

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: gam...@hawk.rice.edu (Ben Gamble)

As long as we're running strings on everything from here to
Berkeley...

Someone in a now-junked message pointed out something from lint. I
don't remember what it was, but here's one I did find in lint, SunOS
4.1.1 (I think):

EDOTDOT!!!!

Your guess is probably much better than mine.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: a...@aber.ac.uk (Alec David Muffett)

In article <NICKEL.91J...@desaster.cs.tu-berlin.de> nic...@cs.tu-berlin.d
e writes:
>In article <OTTO.91Ju...@kalikka.jyu.fi> ot...@kalikka.jyu.fi (Otto J. Mak
ela) writes:
>
>- on SunOS 4.1 and did, in fact, see the string "Thou hast new mail."

You think THATS funny (it is), but strings "/usr/lib/sendmail" for a few laughs:

>From the silly:-

You wascal wabbit! Wandering wizards won't win!
savemail: HELP!!!!

to the plausible but still silly:-

Who are you ?
Can't parse myself!

to the plain ridiculous:-

MAIL DELETED BECAUSE OF LACK OF DISK SPACE

- not to mention all the SMTP "HELO" dialogue...

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: dw...@andrew.cmu.edu (Database Work)

What about this one (present in SunOS 4.1.1 and who knows where else)
when attempting to use the csh builtin 'suspend' from a login shell:

Can't suspend a login shell (yet).

What's that supposed to mean??? Not until later in the afternoon? Not
until they rewrite the shell? Not until you get rid of stopped jobs?

:-) I got quite a chuckle out of that one.

Tod McQuillin

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: jn...@andrew.cmu.edu (Joseph M. Newcomer)

The SAIL compiler had a number of puns on sailing, one of which was the
compiler internal error message which referred to "dryrot" (if you don't
know anything about boats and sailing, be aware that "dryrot" is the
bane of a boatowner's existence, and once it sets in your boat is
doomed...). The modula "dryrot" message seems to indicate that at least
one implementor had used SAIL.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: jn...@andrew.cmu.edu (Joseph M. Newcomer)

The classic short message was from JOSS, one of the early interactive
languages (from the mid-1960's; it ran on a machine at RAND Corporation
called the JOHNNIAC). It was on a small machine. It had one catchall
message:

EH?

this was based on the premise that the error would be so blindingly
obvious to the programmer that no further indication of the nature of
the error was required.

Wrong.

(I worked in another interactive system that thought this was such a
cute idea that they used it. This was a mistake. If you knew the
language, the cause of the error may have been obvious, but if you
didn't know the language you were in deep trouble. They extended this
philosophy to the printed documentation!)

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: jda...@noao.edu (Jim Davis)

Well, I've seen the "You are a charlatan" in a mail context before,
though only on a DEC-20. Lessee, any DEC-20s left... :-(

Oh yeah, sri-nic ..err.. nic.ddn.mil.

bordeaux$ telnet nic.ddn.mil 25
Trying 192.67.67.20 ...
Connected to nic.ddn.mil.
Escape character is '^]'.
220-NIC.DDN.MIL SMTP Service 6.1 at Fri, 26 Jul 91 18:21:06 PDT
220 Don't Worry.
helo nonesuch.noao.edu
250 NIC.DDN.MIL - Never heard of that name, bordeaux.kpno.noao.edu
helo cc.utah.edu
250 NIC.DDN.MIL - You are a charlatan, bordeaux.kpno.noao.edu
quit
221 NIC.DDN.MIL -- Be Happy!

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: fis...@qut.edu.au

In article <ocY7bU200...@andrew.cmu.edu>, jn...@andrew.cmu.edu (Joseph M.
Newcomer) writes:
> The classic short message was from JOSS, one of the early interactive
> languages (from the mid-1960's; it ran on a machine at RAND Corporation
> called the JOHNNIAC). It was on a small machine. It had one catchall
> message:
>
> EH?

We used a language called JEAN on ICL's 1900 series. We knew this was a
dialect of JOSS but it must have been closer than we knew as it used the
same error message.

The JEAN error message I liked was "Your expression has defeated me" which
was generated by a program such as
1.1 X=X
1.2 PRINT X

I never understood this until I was explaining to someone the meaning of
recursion in Algol. To demonstrate that simpler languages could not
handle recursion I gave JEAN a recursive definition of a factorial and
to my surprise it gave the right answer!

To understand this you also need to know that in JEAN
SET X=3 gave the variable X a value.
LET X=3 defined X as a function.
and the default verb was LET, not SET.

Hence "Your formula has defeated me" meant that it had run out of store
because of infinite recursion.

What a pity Basic defeated the much more elegant JOSS.

Bill

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: j...@fig12.cray.com (Otto Tennant)

Twenty or so years ago, the Fortran IV compiler for the SDS Sigma 2
would occasionally comment at the bottom of your listing:

WARNING: 54 - PROGRAM NOT RECURSIVE

(That *looks* right. I'm pretty sure about the number and the text.)

I was somewhat startled by the message, since I knew Fortran programs
were not recursive.

Eventually, in a fit of boredom and despair, I wrote a recursive
program which produced the error message. Worked fine, too. So far
as I know, it may still be running. Wasn't RE-ENTRANT tho.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: gpw...@gp.co.nz

In article <1991Jul29.0...@kcbbs.gen.nz>, Roger...@kcbbs.gen.nz (Roge
r Hicks) writes:
>
> Another fascinating message of the DEC10 at that time was the MAKE
> command, used to load the editor with a new text file.
>
> Typing MAKE LOVE, gave the message NOT WAR, before starting the editor.

This carried over into other operating systems, including RT-11. Another
one I remember is HELP ME, which came back with:

Help is not available for you.

--
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Martin D. Hunt
GP Print Limited USEnet address : mar...@gp.co.nz
Wellington
New Zealand Phone : +64 4 4965648
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: sh...@inferno.peri.com (Shane Bouslough)

>From article <18...@balrog.ctron.com>, by d...@ctron.com (DJ Delorie):
> We just got this one (source file name changed to protect the innocent):
>
> "foo.cc", line 204: internal <<AT&T C++ Translator 2.1.0 03/31/90>> error:
> bus error (or something nasty like that)

Masscomp C compiler:
"Insane structure member list"

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: jcmo...@mwunix.mitre.org (Joe Morris)

In most cases I've found that a good way to find out what you can do with
a language is to read well-written descriptions of what you *can't* do
with it. I got into systems programming in the early 1960s by reading
the error message listings in the FORTRAN compiler, first for the 7090
FMS and later in IBSYS. Of course, in today's world the vendors would
have collective apoplexy if anyone seriously asked to see the compiler
sources, and the error message descriptions seem to routinely go something
like this:

Error ABC123D: User Error

Explanation: An unknown error has occurred in an unidentified program
while executing an unimplemented function at an
undefined address.

User Response: Correct error and resubmit.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: rv...@cs.vu.nl (Ronald van der Pol)

jda...@noao.edu (Jim Davis) writes:

>Well, I've seen the "You are a charlatan" in a mail context before,
>though only on a DEC-20. Lessee, any DEC-20s left... :-(

(this is what an older version of MMDF says)

telnet deskpro.sow.econ.vu.nl smtp
Trying 130.37.48.1 ...
Connected to deskpro.sow.econ.vu.nl.
Escape character is '^]'.
220 deskpro.sow.econ.vu.nl Server SMTP (Complaints/bugs to: postmaster)
helo foo.bar
250 deskpro.sow.econ.vu.nl - Liar, Liar! Pants on Fire!
quit
221 deskpro.sow.econ.vu.nl says goodbye to kappl.cs.vu.nl at Tue Jul 30 22:13:43
.
Connection closed by foreign host.

----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: br...@arkham.wimsey.bc.ca (Brad Murray)

I was just installing PCSA version 4.0 for DOS on a machine here, and after the
boot I got a system error. Okay, no problem, I do a quick

USE \\HOSTNAME

to see if the machine knows anything about the host. Lo and behold, it does
but it refuses to tell me:

Error: Success

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Christoph Lorenz

unread,

Oct 22, 1996, 3:00:00 AM10/22/96

to

Bernd Sluka (be...@sledge.phiger.com) wrote:

: Auf dem Hauptbahnhof in Hannover wird ein Teil der Schließfächer mit
: Magnetkarten bedient. Als ich endlich unser Gepäck verstaut hatte,
: fand sich neben dem zentralen Münzeinwurf ein angeklebter Zettel
: "defekt" und der LCD-Bildschirm zeigte einen typischen Windows-Alert
: mit den Wahlmöglichkeiten "Neustart" und "Abbrechen". Sogar ein
: Mauszeiger war zu sehen, leider aber weit und breit keine Maus.

Im Bahnhof Muenchen-Pasing gibt (oder gab?) es ein Reisebuero mit einem
Schaufenster. Dort war auch ein Computer zwecks Werbung aufgestellt,
aber wirklich jedesmal, als ich dort vorbeigekommen bin, war da
eine Windoof-Fehlermeldungs-Box zu sehen.
Und, obwohl ich seinerzeit woechentlich dort vorbeigekommen bin,
konnte ich nie feststellen, was der *eigentliche* Sinn des Rechners war....

Joerg Heitkoetter

unread,

Oct 22, 1996, 3:00:00 AM10/22/96

to

Vor einer Weile habe ich unten angehaengte "panic lib" in meine
Programme eingebaut; es muss mit "-DEDDIE" compiliert werden,
ansonsten ist's das selbe wie GNU's error.c; es wird in etwa so
verwendet:

...
case 'o':
outfile = optarg;
if (freopen (outfile, "w", stdout) == NULL)
{
panic (E_FATAL, "main", "can't open `%s' for writing", outfile);
}
break;
...

#!/bin/sh
# This is a shell archive (produced by GNU shar 4.1).
# To extract the files from this archive, save it to some FILE, remove
# everything before the `!/bin/sh' line above, then type `sh FILE'.
#
# Existing files will *not* be overwritten unless `-c' is specified.
#
# This shar contains:
# length mode name
# ------ ---------- ------------------------------------------
# 4414 -rw-r--r-- panic.c
# 1174 -rw-r--r-- panic.h
#
touch -am 1231235999 $$.touch >/dev/null 2>&1
if test ! -f 1231235999 && test -f $$.touch; then
shar_touch=touch
else
shar_touch=:
echo 'WARNING: not restoring timestamps'
fi
rm -f 1231235999 $$.touch
#
# ============= panic.c ==============
if test -f 'panic.c' && test X"$1" != X"-c"; then
echo 'x - skipping panic.c (File already exists)'
else
echo 'x - extracting panic.c (text)'
sed 's/^X//' << 'SHAR_EOF' > 'panic.c' &&
X
/* panic.c -- error handler for noninteractive utilities
X
X Copyright (C) 1991 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
X Copyright (C) 1992-1994 Joerg Heitkoetter
X
X This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
X it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
X the Free Software Foundation; either version 2, or (at your option)
X any later version.
X
X This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
X but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
X MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
X GNU General Public License for more details.
X
X You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
X along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
X Foundation, Inc., 675 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA. */
X
/* based on `error.c' by David MacKenzie */
X
#ifndef lint
static char *rcsid = "$Id: panic.c,v 3.3 1994/08/21 13:01:48 joke Rel $";
#endif
X
#include <stdio.h>
#include <errno.h>
#include <time.h>
#include "panic.h"
X
#ifdef EDDIE
static char *adv[] =
{
X "Sirius Cybernetics(TM)",
X "charming",
X "core dumping",
X "dusty",
X "extraordinary",
X "faulty",
X "funny",
X "friendly",
X "humble",
X "irresistable",
X "joking",
X "marvellous",
X "mostly harmless",
X "old and tired",
X "rusty",
X "stupid",
X "terminating",
};
#define ADVSIZ (sizeof(adv)/sizeof(char *))
#endif
X
#ifndef VPRINTF_MISSING
X
#ifdef __STDC__
#include <stdarg.h>
#define VA_START(args, lastarg) va_start(args, lastarg)
#else /* not __STDC__ */
#include <varargs.h>
#define VA_START(args, lastarg) va_start(args)
#endif /* __STDC__ */
X
#else /* not VPRINTF_MISSING */
X
#ifndef DOPRNT_MISSING
#define va_alist args
#define va_dcl int args;
#else /* DOPRNT_MISSING */
#define va_alist a1, a2, a3, a4, a5, a6, a7, a8
#define va_dcl char *a1, *a2, *a3, *a4, *a5, *a6, *a7, *a8;
#endif /* DOPRNT_MISSING */
X
#endif /* VPRINTF_MISSING */
X
#ifdef STDC_HEADERS
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <string.h>
#else /* not STDC_HEADERS */
void exit ();
#endif /* STDC_HEADERS */
X
#ifdef STRERROR_MISSING
static char *
private_strerror (errnum)
X int errnum;
{
X extern char *sys_errlist[];
X extern int sys_nerr;
X
X if (errnum > 0 && errnum < sys_nerr)
X return sys_errlist[errnum];
X return "Unknown system error";
}
X
#define strerror private_strerror
#endif /* STRERROR_MISSING */
X
/* Print the program name and error message MESSAGE, which is a printf-style
X format string with optional args.
X If ERRNUM is nonzero, print its corresponding system error message.
X Exit with status STATUS if it is nonzero. */
/* VARARGS */
int
X
#if !defined (VPRINTF_MISSING) && defined (__STDC__)
panic (int level, char *caller, char *message, ...)
#else /* VPRINTF_MISSING or not __STDC__ */
panic (level, caller, message, va_alist)
X int level;
X char *caller;
X char *message;
X va_dcl
#endif /* not VPRINTF_MISSING or __STDC__ */
{
X
#ifndef VPRINTF_MISSING
X va_list args;
#endif /* VPRINTF_MISSING */
X
#ifdef EDDIE
X srand (time (0));
X fprintf (stderr, "\n\007*** DON'T PANIC\n");
X fprintf (stderr, "Hi there, this is Eddie your %s ", adv[rand () % ADVSIZ]);
X fprintf (stderr, "shipboard computer\n");
X fprintf (stderr, "I really don't want to bother you, but I received\n");
X if ((program_name != NULL) && (*program_name != '\0'))
X fprintf (stderr, "the following error message from level %d while running `%s'...\n", level, program_name);
X else
X fprintf (stderr, "the following error message from level %d while running...\n", level);
#endif
X
X if (*program_name != '\0')
X fprintf (stderr, "%s: ", program_name);
X
X if (*caller != '\0')
X fprintf (stderr, "%s: ", caller);
X
#ifndef VPRINTF_MISSING
X VA_START (args, message);
X vfprintf (stderr, message, args);
X va_end (args);
#else /* VPRINTF_MISSING */
X
#ifndef DOPRNT_MISSING
X _doprnt (message, &args, stderr);
#else /* DOPRNT_MISSING */
X fprintf (stderr, message, a1, a2, a3, a4, a5, a6, a7, a8);
#endif /* DOPRNT_MISSING */
X
#endif /* VPRINTF_MISSING */
X
X if (errno)
X fprintf (stderr, ": %s", (char *) strerror (errno));
X putc ('\n', stderr);
X
#ifdef EDDIE
X fprintf (stderr, "***\n");
#endif
X
X fflush (stderr);
X
#ifdef EGREP_COMPAT
X if (level < 0)
X exit (2); /* e?grep fatal return code */
#else
X if (level < 0)
X exit (1);
#endif
X
X return (level);
}
SHAR_EOF
$shar_touch -am 0103135595 'panic.c' &&
chmod 0644 'panic.c' ||
echo 'restore of panic.c failed'
shar_count="`wc -c < 'panic.c'`"
test 4414 -eq "$shar_count" ||
echo "panic.c: original size 4414, current size $shar_count"
fi
# ============= panic.h ==============
if test -f 'panic.h' && test X"$1" != X"-c"; then
echo 'x - skipping panic.h (File already exists)'
else
echo 'x - extracting panic.h (text)'
sed 's/^X//' << 'SHAR_EOF' > 'panic.h' &&
X
/* panic.h -- error handler for noninteractive utilities
X
X Copyright (C) 1992, 1993 Joerg Heitkoetter
X
X This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
X it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
X the Free Software Foundation; either version 2, or (at your option)
X any later version.
X
X This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
X but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
X MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
X GNU General Public License for more details.
X
X You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
X along with this program; if not, write to the Free Software
X Foundation, Inc., 675 Mass Ave, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA. */
X
/* $Id: panic.h,v 3.3 1994/08/21 13:01:49 joke Rel $ */
X
/* stripped from `error.c' by David MacKenzie */
X
#ifndef __PANIC_H__
#define __PANIC_H__
X
#define E_FATAL (-1)
#define E_WARN (1)
X
extern char *program_name; /* pointer to argv[0] */
X
#ifdef __STDC__
extern int panic (int level, char *caller, char *message, ...);
#else
extern int panic ();
#endif
X
#endif /* __PANIC_H__ */
SHAR_EOF
$shar_touch -am 0103135595 'panic.h' &&
chmod 0644 'panic.h' ||
echo 'restore of panic.h failed'
shar_count="`wc -c < 'panic.h'`"
test 1174 -eq "$shar_count" ||
echo "panic.h: original size 1174, current size $shar_count"
fi
exit 0
--
Have fun, -joke

So Close No Matter How Far/ Couldn't We Be Driven Much More From The Heart?
Forever Trusting In Who We Are/ For Then Nothing Else Matters...

Juergen Nickelsen

unread,

Oct 24, 1996, 3:00:00 AM10/24/96

to

Helmut Fromberger <h...@reactor.in-passau.de> wrote:

> reactor.hf $ strings /usr/bin/talk | grep exist

> You don't exist. Go away.

"You don't exist. Go away." sagt es, wenn der Aufrufer nicht in
/etc/utmp eingetragen ist (ausprobiert vor Jahren unter irgendeinem
Ultrix).

--
Juergen Nickelsen

Martin Appel

unread,

Oct 24, 1996, 3:00:00 AM10/24/96

to

Bernd Sluka <be...@sledge.phiger.com> wrote:

> Auf dem Hauptbahnhof in Hannover wird ein Teil der Schließfächer mit
> Magnetkarten bedient. Als ich endlich unser Gepäck verstaut hatte,
> fand sich neben dem zentralen Münzeinwurf ein angeklebter Zettel
> "defekt" und der LCD-Bildschirm zeigte einen typischen Windows-Alert
> mit den Wahlmöglichkeiten "Neustart" und "Abbrechen". Sogar ein
> Mauszeiger war zu sehen, leider aber weit und breit keine Maus.

Einige Lufthansa-Check-In-Automaten auf dem Muenchner Flughafen zeigen
auch manchmal eine OS/2-Oberflaeche mit Fehlermeldung und Mauszeiger
statt des normalen Begruessungs-Schirms.

Gert Doering

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Oct 24, 1996, 3:00:00 AM10/24/96

to

Martin Appel <mar...@camelot.de> writes:

>Bernd Sluka <be...@sledge.phiger.com> wrote:

>> Auf dem Hauptbahnhof in Hannover wird ein Teil der Schließfächer mit
>> Magnetkarten bedient. Als ich endlich unser Gepäck verstaut hatte,
>> fand sich neben dem zentralen Münzeinwurf ein angeklebter Zettel
>> "defekt" und der LCD-Bildschirm zeigte einen typischen Windows-Alert
>> mit den Wahlmöglichkeiten "Neustart" und "Abbrechen". Sogar ein
>> Mauszeiger war zu sehen, leider aber weit und breit keine Maus.

>Einige Lufthansa-Check-In-Automaten auf dem Muenchner Flughafen zeigen
>auch manchmal eine OS/2-Oberflaeche mit Fehlermeldung und Mauszeiger
>statt des normalen Begruessungs-Schirms.

*Das* hatte ich neulich bei einem Geldautomaten... ploetzlich wurde der
Schirm schwarz, und dann konnte man OS/2 1.3 beim Booten zusehen. War
*sehr* interessant (bis auf die Tatsache, dass er bei der Gelegenheit
meine Karte gefressen hat und ich die dann innen in der Bank abholen
musste...).

Stefan Scholl

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Oct 24, 1996, 3:00:00 AM10/24/96

to

Martin Appel <mar...@camelot.de> wrote:

> Einige Lufthansa-Check-In-Automaten auf dem Muenchner Flughafen zeigen
> auch manchmal eine OS/2-Oberflaeche mit Fehlermeldung und Mauszeiger
> statt des normalen Begruessungs-Schirms.

Ist doch nichts gegen den Offenen Kanal Speyer, der
grunds=E4tzlich ab Freitag bis Montag einen blinkenden Guru
(Amiga-Absturz) gezeigt hat.

***Stefan

--=20
## Stefan Scholl <ste...@sks.inka.de> ## <http://home.pages.de/~stesch/> #=
#

"Schreiben Sie langsam, ich bin AOL-User" [cb...@aol.com]

Thomas Servene

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Oct 25, 1996, 3:00:00 AM10/25/96

to

be...@sledge.phiger.com (Bernd Sluka) writes:

->Auf dem Hauptbahnhof in Hannover wird ein Teil der Schließfächer mit
->Magnetkarten bedient. Als ich endlich unser Gepäck verstaut hatte,
->fand sich neben dem zentralen Münzeinwurf ein angeklebter Zettel
->"defekt" und der LCD-Bildschirm zeigte einen typischen Windows-Alert
->mit den Wahlmöglichkeiten "Neustart" und "Abbrechen". Sogar ein
->Mauszeiger war zu sehen, leider aber weit und breit keine Maus.

Hauptbahnhoefe sind schon ein schoener Spielplatz :-)
Mein Lieblingsgeraet in HBf Koeln: Das Fahrplanauskunfts-Terminal des
Verkehrsverbundes VRS. In den ersten Versionen gab es einen huebschen
Fehler:
Zur Orientierung fuer Ortsfremde waren zusaetzlich zu den eigentlichen
Haltestellen auch noch markante Punkte als Fahrtziel angegeben, so
z.B. Dom (-> Dom/HBf), Millowitsch-Theater (-> Rudolfplatz) usw.
Man konnte nun einen Fahrtwunsch vom Millowitsch zum Rudolfplatz
eingeben (fuer einen Ortsfremden ja nicht offensichtlich das gleiche),
welcher (nach laengerer Wartezeit) mit einem Windows-Absturz und
anschliessendem Kaltstart des PC quittiert wurde :-)
Immerhin konnte man so rauskriegen, dass in dem Terminal ein
486SX/25 mit 16 MB RAM werkelt.

Leider ist der Fehler inzwischen behoben (Meldung: Fahrt nicht
moeglich :-(
Wahrscheinlich haben die Verantwortlichen bemerkt, dass das Teil
permanent am Booten war :-)

Thomas
--
\\_/##]o___ Thomas Servene, IKH, FZ Rossendorf \\_/##]o___
(*)=5==(*)\_ e-mail: ser...@fz-rossendorf.de (*)=1==(*)\_

Benjamin Baermann

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Oct 25, 1996, 3:00:00 AM10/25/96

to

Auch noch eine sehr schoene von mir. Gerade erst gestern abend gesehen:

sh: fortune not found

Wie, nicht witzig genug? Dann stellt euch das mal in Regenbogenfarben an
wechselnden Stellen des Schirms vor ;-)

Linux mit xlock-Bildschirmschoner und wohl einem nicht existenten fortune.

Gruesse, Benni
--
http://www.uni-frankfurt.de/~benni/
"Der Mensch spielt nur, wo er in voller Bedeutung des Wortes Mensch ist,
und er ist nur da ganz Mensch, wo er spielt." Friedrich Schiller

Kate Baumann

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Oct 25, 1996, 3:00:00 AM10/25/96

to

Bernd Sluka wrote:
>
> Auf dem Hauptbahnhof in Hannover wird ein Teil der Schließfächer mit

> Magnetkarten bedient. Als ich endlich unser Gepäck verstaut hatte,

> fand sich neben dem zentralen Münzeinwurf ein angeklebter Zettel

> "defekt" und der LCD-Bildschirm zeigte einen typischen Windows-Alert

> mit den Wahlmöglichkeiten "Neustart" und "Abbrechen". Sogar ein

> Mauszeiger war zu sehen, leider aber weit und breit keine Maus.
>

Wo Hannover doch gut ist fuer Fehlermeldungen, die mehr
"bare to the bone" sind.

Neulich, als ich - wie immer zu spaet und ohne Fruehstueck -
morgens zum CeBIT Einsatz fuhr stiess ich am Kroepke auf eines
dieser Kaffeehaeuschen. Schade, geschlossen weil Samstag. Ok,
typisch null Service in dieser Stadt. Aber halt, da haengt ja
ein Cola-Automat. Prima kommt gerade richtig. <nach Geld finger,
raushol, reintun will> F**k was laeuft da an FEHLERMELDUNG auf
dem Display? "HILFE!!! F7 HILFE!!! F7"
Keine Cola aber dafuer herzlich gelacht.

Stunden spaeter als ich darueber sinnierte, wo wohl die
Schnittstelle an dem Teil ist, um ein Keyboard anzuschliessen
kam mir der Gedanke, dass wohl einfach Fehler 7 gemeint war
statt F7 ...

-- Kate Baumann --------------------------
-- PONTON EUROPEAN MEDIA ART LAB ---------
-- Lister Str. 17 - D-30163 Hannover -----
-- http://www.ponton.uni-hannover.de -----
-- mailto:ka...@ponton.uni-hannover.de ----

Marcus Herbert

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Oct 25, 1996, 3:00:00 AM10/25/96

to

Lutz Donnerhacke <lu...@as-node.jena.thur.de> wrote:
> Oder selbstgeschriebenes?

Naja... faellt eventuell hier hinein, wenn man versucht, FORTUNE so zu
uebersetzen:

> root /usr/src/fortune # make love
> Not war?
[3 Sek. Pause]
> Look, I'm not equipped for that, okay?
> Contact your hardware vendor for appropriate mods.

Olaf Titz

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Oct 26, 1996, 3:00:00 AM10/26/96

to

Christian Schlittchen <cor...@amber.hb.north.de> wrote:
> The route-addr hits...
> Your mailer feels weeker
> The route-addr hits...

Das ist sogar in der Manpage erwähnt:
-bR Enter the hostile mail domain of giant mail mes-
sages, and RFC standard scrolls. Attempt to make
it down to protocol level 26 and back.

Wer sich darunter nichts vorstellen kann, probiere es aus. :-)

Im Source zu dem Modul findet sich sogar ein sinnvoller Grund dafür.
Da steht ungefähr: "dieses Modul wird zuletzt gelinkt, um einen
off-by-one-error in bestimmten Versionen von gdb zu umgehen".
Und da implementierte man eben einen Modus, den man im täglichen
Mailerbetrieb normalerweise nicht so oft braucht ;-)

olaf
--
___ Olaf...@inka.de or @{stud,informatik}.uni-karlsruhe.de ____
__ o <URL:http://www.inka.de/~bigred/> <IRC:praetorius>
__/<_ >> Just as long as the wheels keep on turning round
_)>(_)______________ I will live for the groove 'til the sun goes down << ____

Stefan Zeiger

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Oct 26, 1996, 3:00:00 AM10/26/96

to

Marcus Herbert schrieb:

> > root /usr/src/fortune # make love
> > Not war?
> [3 Sek. Pause]
> > Look, I'm not equipped for that, okay?
> > Contact your hardware vendor for appropriate mods.

Auch sch=F6n ist das maplay-Makefile:

isobel:/usr/local/src/maplay# make it so
I'll do my very best, Captain.
[Hier folgt ein make config; make install]
Further orders, Sir?
isobel:/usr/local/src/maplay#

Marcus Grieger

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Oct 26, 1996, 3:00:00 AM10/26/96

to

In a message of 25 Oct 96 Thomas Servene <ser...@fz-rossendorf.de (Thomas
Servene)> wrote:

TS> Hauptbahnhoefe sind schon ein schoener Spielplatz :-)
TS> Mein Lieblingsgeraet in HBf Koeln: Das Fahrplanauskunfts-Terminal des
TS> Verkehrsverbundes VRS. In den ersten Versionen gab es einen huebschen
TS> Fehler:

[...]

Da hab ich auch einen, bei uns in der Uni gibt's son Fahrplanterminal, das hat
halt so ein nomales Pull-Down Menue, unter dem Menuepunkt "Ende" gibt's gleich
unter "Programm beenden" den Punkt "Programm nicht beenden"... :)

(wobei man das Menue auch normal mit ESC verlassen kann....)

--
._
cya, :_ __! \ . ___ . ____
__! \/ \ :__/ _} :__/ \
/ \ ^ \! \ (___! \ __/
.../ . . \_|___/ 7_/ \ | /\ \...
\__|_|__/ / ! \___/ /_____/
\__!\_/ \__/
eMail: fu...@hrz.uni-bielefeld.de: or: intr...@guardian.fido.de
FidoNet: 2:2432/230.fourty-two VNet: 46:9611/1104.fourty-two

Kai Rode

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Oct 30, 1996, 3:00:00 AM10/30/96

to

Frank wrote:

> Gottseidank gab's nur Zahlen, RETURN und ein paar F-Tasten,
> wer weiß, was man da hätte eingeben können :-)

eject /amount:all /currency:deutschmark money. ;-)

Bye
Kai
--
All equal, all different...

Josef Wolf

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Nov 3, 1996, 3:00:00 AM11/3/96

to

In <326FBBC2...@humphrey.westfalen.de> Frank Wuebbeling <frank.wu...@humphrey.westfalen.de> writes:
>Da fand ich allerdings den Geldautomaten in unserer lokalen Volksbank,
>der offensichtlich im DOS-Kommandomodus gelandet war und bei dem man
>mit der Tastatur sogar Befehle eintippen konnte, noch bedenklicher.

>Gottseidank gab's nur Zahlen, RETURN und ein paar F-Tasten,

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Du hast nicht zufaellig ausprobiert, ob eine der Tasten der ALT-Taste
entspricht? ;-)

>wer weiß, was man da hätte eingeben können :-)

Gruebel... :-)
--
-- Josef Wolf -- j...@raven.inka.de -- Germersheim, Germany --