Hello!
Clem by chance do you remember what the error message response was? It
would be interesting to see what phrases were used. For example, on
the IBM side of things, a fellow Adam and I both know, coded an entire
application so that everything it said and did would be in Klingonese.
No I do not remember which one it was, and what have you, I only
remember it surfacing during his talk at the IBM offices here in town,
during the early years of running Tux on the IBM S/390 systems.
I also find it strange that sometimes even Google is thinking in that language.
-----
Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8(a)gmail.com
"This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again."
On Thu, Nov 21, 2019 at 3:09 PM Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote:
On Thu, Nov 21, 2019 at 2:53 PM Noel Chiappa <jnc(a)mercury.lcs.mit.edu> wrote:
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 ;-)