> From: Arnold Robbins
> The Bell Labs guys in some ways were too.
And there's the famous? story about the Multics error messages in Latin,
courtesty of Bernie Greenberg. One actually appeared at a customer site once,
whereupon hilarity ensued.
One of my favorite stories of the same vein was a masscomp story. We were chasing a rare event (as I recall it was when we first were debugging Multiprocessor stuff and it a lock order problem). But we could not get the customers to tell us about what was happening, since the system recovered quickly, but we might kill a process. We had done a few releases and make a few changes but we could never reproduce it.
I never knew who it was but someone ??Jack Burness if I had to guess?? put out a patch with a couple of error messages in Klingon and dumped a bunch of information. Sure enough this was noticed, customer stopped, we got the needed data, as they reported the error. But it was a high visibility customer, so the president (Mr. Potatohead) got a phone call. Fossil (our boss) made us swear it would never happen again, but he defended us to the President. We found the bug ;-)