13 of the best error messages

[Harrison]

One reason I loved my Amstrad CPC464 was the built in tape deck that never had loading errors. I knew so many Spectrum and Electron users who has no end of tape loading issues, especially the Spectrum with the volume level needing to be just right on the tape desk, and if you so much as blew on the Kempston joystick interface or any ram expansions it crashed... whereas my CPC just loaded the games from tape with a smile on its face and no issues. I actually can't remember a game ever failing to load, even copied games using an Amstrad dual tape deck hifi. Those were the days.

I also agree with you about the RRoD on the 360. I also don't own one so it is an amusing error... instead we just keep on enjoying our PS3s.

But like you I picked the Guru because it was so cool at the time, and every other system was so serious about their error messages that were clearly generated by someone with a computer science brain and no creativity in their hearts. The reasons the Amiga will always remain so loved.

[Stephen Coates]

Right, I've remembered what I wrote last night.

Like everyone, I like the Guru Meditation. But I chose Abort, Retry, Fail? as my favorite. Why? Because it is nice and simple and gives several ways of getting out of it.

I also like lp0 on fire, but as I have never had a burning printer attached to a Unix system, I have never been on the receiving end of that error, so don't really want to vote for it.

[Harrison]

With "Abort, Retry, Fail?" have you ever managed to cancel the error? It isn't really an error I even encounter these days, as I don't use an OS that throws it up. In the days of Win9x I used to see it a lot with read errors on floppy disks or CD-Rs, or if a disk had been removed when still needed. In sure instances it could never be cancelled and would just re show the same message each time any option was clicked, often crashing with that great screen redraw crash effect where you could drag the window around the screen to repeat draw the window all over the screen until you finally got bored and hit the reset button. The Mac used to have that same repeating window crash issue too.

[Stephen Coates]

I refer to the error in DOS.

I seem to recall having the error in Windows and it can be difficult to get rid of it, but that applies to a lot of Windows errors.

In DOS I usually find that Abort will get rid of it (like it is supposed to do). Fail and Retry can be useful though.

Oddly, on my HP 100LX a least, when accessing a PCMCIA memory card which it can't read, pressing Abort keeps repeating the error, whereas Fail cancels it and just switches to 'Current drive is no longer valid>'.

[J T]

From our old chum Stu (http://wosblog.podgamer.com/2011/07/...w-about-apple/)