🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <4341@mwk.uucp> gleason@mwk.uucp (Lee K. Gleason, Control-G Consultants) writes:
>  My three favorite DEC error messages/statuses...

	Hmmm... Nine years ago I hacked MIR-1 (table-sized transistor
	machine with 4 Kb core memory, punch tape, typewriter and
	built-in interpreter of ALGOL-like language).
	This funny machine had ONLY ONE error message: "NO MEM".
	All other errors were indicated on lamps above tubler registers.

	Vadim Antonov
	DEMOS, Moscow, USSR
	(It is NOT a joke!)

One of my favorite messages from a computer system was generated
by a compiler (I believe it was Fortran) on a Honeywell CP-6 computer.

If you created a label called JAIL and somewhere you had a statement
GOTO JAIL, the compiler would generate a warning message like this:

    Warning:  Go directly to jail, do not collect $200.

Or something like that.  I laughed out loud after a friend told me
about that and I tried it.  The program worked just fine, you just
got a warning message when you compiled it.

I don't know if the message is still generated by the current compiler,
this was from 8 years ago (good grief).

P.S.  The quote is from the "Goto Jail" card in the game of Monopoly,
if you didn't recognize it.

--
Greg Hunt                        Internet: hu...@dg-rtp.rtp.dg.com
DG/UX Kernel Development         UUCP:     {world}!mcnc!rti!dg-rtp!hunt
Data General Corporation
Research Triangle Park, NC       These opinions are mine, not DG's.

In article <1990Sep23....@hq.demos.su>, a...@hq.demos.su (Vadim G. Antonov) writes:
> 	Hmmm... Nine years ago I hacked MIR-1 (table-sized transistor
> 	machine with 4 Kb core memory, punch tape, typewriter and
> 	built-in interpreter of ALGOL-like language).
> 	This funny machine had ONLY ONE error message: "NO MEM".
> 	All other errors were indicated on lamps above tubler registers.

Sorry, I can't resist any longer. Whenever this thread comes along, I just
*have* to mention TRS-80 Model I Level I BASIC, which had only three
error messages: What? (syntax error) How? (divide by zero, etc.) and Sorry!
(out of memory, etc.)
-- 
===============================================================================
Roger Ivie

35 S 300 W
Logan, Ut.  84321
(801) 752-8633
===============================================================================

hu...@dg-rtp.rtp.dg.com (Greg Hunt) writes:

I always wonder why someone else didn't think of this one (I didn't think 
of it one of my friends told it to me). The message is

	LOW BUDGET CHECKING ERROR

imagine: "Low budget checking error, buy more RAM"
rather than "Out of memory".


	Jens
Jens Tingleff MSc EE, Institute of Computer Science, Copenhagen University
Snail mail: DIKU Universitetsparken 1, DK2100 KBH O
"It never runs around here; it just comes crashing down"
	apologies to  Dire Straits 

In article <4341@mwk.uucp> gleason@mwk.uucp (Lee K. Gleason, Control-G Consultants) writes:
>
>  An early time sharing computer took advantage of the architecture of
>the machine it was running on to efficiently shuffle programs in core,
>but it could only do it to lower addresses. As time went by and more
>programs entered and exited, someone would get into a state where
>his process could shuffle no lower. The error message would tell 
>the user "30K of memory available - but not for you."

That would have been the PDP-6, the prototype for the PDP-10, circa 1964;
in his talk for DECUS, Peter J Hurley describes the situation thus:

    Since there was no swapping, everything had to fit in memory.
    Programs were shuffled to close up the unused space.  But because
    the BLT [BLock Transfer] instruction was used, shuffling could
    only move programs toward lower addresses (5K monitor, remember?).
    Thus, after one's compile had been running for twenty minutes,
    growing towards someone else's job, one might get an error message

	Core available, but not to you

    and could try to persuade the other person to kill his job or,
    more likely, would have to kill one's own job, type CORE 0 to
    cause shuffling, and start again.

Actually, it wasn't quite that bad, since one could, if the program
was reasonably well-behaved, CTRL/C it and SAVE the image before
forcing a core shuffle, and then restart the saved image afterwards.

Another good one is described in the same talk:

    PIP was invented by "Dit" Morse as a demonstration of device
    independence.  Its original name was ATLATL, which stood for
    "Anything, Lord, to Anything, Lord".  This was appropriate, as it
    took a certain amount of prayer to get anything to move between
    media.  In those days, when TTY's had backarrows (instead of
    underscores) that key was used instead of the equals sign in PIP.
    This, it was felt, was sufficiently obvious that anyone who, for
    example, tried to read from the line printer got a message like:

	You gnerd, device LPT: can't do input!

    That message was changed the day after Ken Olsen tried out ATLATL.

Lum
--
-- 
Lum Johnson      l...@cis.ohio-state.edu      l...@osu-20.ircc.ohio-state.edu
"You got it kid -- the large print giveth and the small print taketh away."
-------

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

>imagine: "Low budget checking error, buy more RAM"
>rather than "Out of memory".

Yes!  The Philips P855 computer indeed DOES (did?) have an error message
BUY MORE CORE.
(It is a minicomputer from the early seventies, with 32K words of 16 bits
ring core memory, built completely with TTL chips.  Access time around 7
us.  I learnt to program on that thing!)

--
|                 | "Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what |
| Jurjen N.E. Bos | it might appear to others that what you were or might |
|                 | have been was not otherwise than what you had been    |
|  jur...@cwi.nl  | would have appeared to them to be otherwise."         |

The BBC B micro's BASIC had a (very good) renumber command. If you got the
parameters wrong in some way (which I forget; I suppose it was something
like renumber 500,0 instead of 0,500 ie renumber the lines 0 to 500), you
got the error message
	Silly

It may just be me, but this strikes me as being very English.

	Tim.
-- 
Tim Oldham, BT Applied Systems. t...@its.bt.co.uk or ...uunet!ukc!its!tjo
Living in interesting times.

In article <35...@cc.usu.edu>, SL...@cc.usu.edu (Roger Ivie) writes:
> In article <1990Sep23....@hq.demos.su>, a...@hq.demos.su (Vadim G. Antonov) writes:
> > 	Hmmm... Nine years ago I hacked MIR-1 (table-sized transistor
> > 	machine with 4 Kb core memory, punch tape, typewriter and
> > 	built-in interpreter of ALGOL-like language).
> > 	This funny machine had ONLY ONE error message: "NO MEM".
> > 	All other errors were indicated on lamps above tubler registers.
> 
> Sorry, I can't resist any longer. Whenever this thread comes along, I just
> *have* to mention TRS-80 Model I Level I BASIC, which had only three
> error messages: What? (syntax error) How? (divide by zero, etc.) and Sorry!
> (out of memory, etc.)


I remember a diferrent one which you got when you ran out
of memory - "OM" Sort of like it started humming its
mantra, but it meant "Out of Memory". The other was the
one I regularly got just as you finished typing in 15k of Basic
code for some neat little hack (and just before you saved
it to cassette tape).  My brother who shift in his seat,
kick the power cord and we'd get "MEM SIZE?" This became
my default expression to indicate that I'm very confused
and need to reset myself. Of course, all work is lost and
you try again...

				- peterd


--------------------------------------------------------------------------
+-------+ 	Peter Deutsch		McGill University
| u # u |	pet...@cs.mcgill.ca	School of Computer Science
|/\/\/\/|	
|  a a  |	
 \  a  /	"Love my work, hate my job..."
  \___/         
--------------------------------------------------------------------------

In article <35...@cc.usu.edu> SL...@cc.usu.edu (Roger Ivie) writes:
>Sorry, I can't resist any longer. Whenever this thread comes along, I just
>*have* to mention TRS-80 Model I Level I BASIC, which had only three
>error messages: What? (syntax error) How? (divide by zero, etc.) and Sorry!
>(out of memory, etc.)

Radio Shack had the most copies of that out, but if you look around you
will find that what the Model I ran, was Chien's Tiny Basic, and the full
listing for it is in volume 1 of Dr. Dobbs Journal of Computer Calisthenics
& Orthodontia (Running Light Without Overbyte)

I even had a disk of the source and for kicks compiled that on some later
machines.


-- 
Bill Vermillion - UUCP: uunet!tarpit!bilver!bill
                      : bill@bilver.UUCP

The old Burroughs B6700 system software had some interesting error
messages. I'm quoting from memory, so this is approximate, but I think
these came from the Espol compiler (language used for early versions of
the OS).

Messages from the machine were simply numeric codes like "Error 91", and
you had to look them up in the manual for the real error message.

One said something like:

Error Code		Message
----------		-------
91: 			Error Number Ninety-One

The message for another:

I you understand what this construct means, implement it.

--brian

-- 
Internet: br...@comp.vuw.ac.nz
Postal: Brian Boutel, Computer Science Dept, Victoria University of Wellington,
        PO Box 600, Wellington, New Zealand
Phone: +64 4 721000

I got the following error from good `ol 'rn'.

I like to scan article titles in a group with '=' before I go into the group.
One time I got overzealous and tried to save an article from the listing of
headers and got:

           Saving null articles is not very productive! :-)

I guess that makes :-) an official punctuation mark :-)


|      |      |      |     |    |    |    |   |   |   |   |  |  | | | | |||||||
     ___  __   ___                 Kirk Pearson
    /   \/  \ |   \                uunet!csu-cs!pearson
  _/         \|    \               pea...@handel.cs.colostate.edu
                    \_             pearson%handel.cs.colostate.edu@cunyvm
"Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage."
 -- H.L. Mencken
|      |      |      |     |    |    |    |   |   |   |   |  |  | | | | |||||||

l...@giza.cis.ohio-state.edu (Lum Johnson) wrote:
>     PIP was invented by "Dit" Morse as a demonstration of device
>     independence.  Its original name was ATLATL, which stood for
>     "Anything, Lord, to Anything, Lord".

Morse was also making an allusion you missed.  An atlatl is a throwing
stick, a hollowed stick used to throw spears faster and further than the
unassisted human arm can manage; I think the word is Aztec.  It's the same
gadget as the Australian Aboriginal "woomera".




-- 
--  Jack Campin   Computing Science Department, Glasgow University, 17 Lilybank
Gardens, Glasgow G12 8QQ, Scotland   041 339 8855 x6044 work  041 556 1878 home
JANET: ja...@cs.glasgow.ac.uk    BANG!net: via mcsun and ukc   FAX: 041 330 4913
INTERNET: via nsfnet-relay.ac.uk   BITNET: via UKACRL   UUCP: jack@glasgow.uucp

In article <97...@ccncsu.ColoState.EDU>, pearson@handel (Kirk Pearson) writes:
| One time I got overzealous and tried to save an article from the listing of
| headers and got:
| 
|            Saving null articles is not very productive! :-)
| 
| I guess that makes :-) an official punctuation mark :-)

Not surprising, knowing who wrote rn.  (Yes, I'm one of the 22,425
people that have met Larry personally. :-)

There's also:

	Cancelling null articles is your idea of fun?  :-)

in the same sourcefile (respond.c).

Just another (former) rn user,
-- 
/=Randal L. Schwartz, Stonehenge Consulting Services (503)777-0095 ==========\
| on contract to Intel's iWarp project, Beaverton, Oregon, USA, Sol III      |
| mer...@iwarp.intel.com ...!any-MX-mailer-like-uunet!iwarp.intel.com!merlyn |
\=Cute Quote: "Welcome to Portland, Oregon, home of the California Raisins!"=/

t...@its.bt.co.uk (Tim Oldham) writes:

>The BBC B micro's BASIC had a (very good) renumber command. If you got the
>parameters wrong in some way (which I forget; I suppose it was something
>like renumber 500,0 instead of 0,500 ie renumber the lines 0 to 500), you
>got the error message
>	Silly

>It may just be me, but this strikes me as being very English.

And then the Basic ROM User Guide (some third-party publication) had an
example in it of a hack around this. For if you REALLY wanted all your
lines to have the same line number.

Now, ain't that silly!

-					Gerben.
--
--- Gerben Vos - Aconet: {BBCBBS,BIGBEN}!Gerben Vos - Internet: gp...@cs.vu.nl

In article <35...@cc.usu.edu> SL...@cc.usu.edu (Roger Ivie) writes:
>Sorry, I can't resist any longer. Whenever this thread comes along, I just
>*have* to mention TRS-80 Model I Level I BASIC, which had only three
>error messages: What? (syntax error) How? (divide by zero, etc.) and Sorry!
>(out of memory, etc.)

Well...  Frankly, I'd say that the Model I had *four* error messages.  You
left out the one I saw most often, the one that clears the screen and goes

	MEM SIZE?

in the top left corner.  Yup, that's the boot message, and it signified
that you had managed to crash the machine sufficiently hard as to cause
it to reset.  I did quite a bit of assembly language programming on it,
you see...

In fact, a couple of friends and myself used to have a habit of saying
"mem size?" to signify that we didn't understand what somebody was
talking about...  :-)

-tih
-- 
Tom Ivar Helbekkmo, NHH, Bergen, Norway.  Telephone: +47-5-959205
t...@barsoom.nhh.no, thelbekk@norunit.bitnet, edb...@debet.nhh.no

In article <22...@opus.cs.mcgill.ca> pet...@opus.cs.mcgill.ca (Peter Deutsch) writes:
>In article <35...@cc.usu.edu>, SL...@cc.usu.edu (Roger Ivie) writes:
>> 
>> Sorry, I can't resist any longer. Whenever this thread comes along, I just
>> *have* to mention TRS-80 Model I Level I BASIC, which had only three
>> error messages: What? (syntax error) How? (divide by zero, etc.) and Sorry!
>> (out of memory, etc.)
>
>
>I remember a diferrent one which you got when you ran out
>of memory - "OM" Sort of like it started humming its
>mantra, but it meant "Out of Memory". The other was the
>one I regularly got just as you finished typing in 15k of Basic
>code for some neat little hack (and just before you saved
>it to cassette tape).  My brother who shift in his seat,
>kick the power cord and we'd get "MEM SIZE?" This became
>my default expression to indicate that I'm very confused
>and need to reset myself. Of course, all work is lost and
>you try again...
>
>				- peterd

That was TRS-80 level *2* BASIC.  You see, originally Radio Shack decided
that people wouldn't want to spend lots of money on the computer, so 
they planned to sell a lot of minimum models.  (The second production run
was planned to approximately equal the number of Radio Shack stores in
existence, so that they could use it for inventory or something - the
Shack really had no confidence that this was going to fly!)  So, to save
money, they provided lots of 4K ROM systems (Level 1 BASIC) and also
ordered some 12K ROM systems (Level 2 BASIC).  When I got my machine,
I had to wait months for the level 2 ROMs, and got fairly good with the
level 1 stuff.

That BASIC had the three error messages mentioned; "MEMORY SIZE?" belonged
to the level 2 system ("MEM SIZE?" was a later change when they were trying
to save memory space; I suppose an extra three bytes helped a little :-)
and was the standard startup question.  The idea was that you might want to
reserve some of high memory for machine-language subroutines, and if so
you needed to do this before BASIC got set up.

Anyway, one nice thing that Level 1 BASIC would do with the error was
print the offending line with a question mark where the error occurred.
This was missing in Level 2 BASIC, which caused some problems when
trying to debug a one-line program.  (A magazine called _SoftSide_ or
something similar kept printing one-line programs.  One of them even
ran a video game that kept score!)

DHT