When IBM started using pictures instead of text in their assembly instructions, I coinded the phrase "International icons: unintelligible in any language." The concept, of course, applies to software, not just to printed product assembly instruction, and indisputably not just IBM.
BTW, would it hurt when the product assembly involves bolts and screws to specify how much torque to apply? -- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3 ________________________________________ From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [[email protected]] on behalf of Charles Mills [[email protected]] Sent: Thursday, June 11, 2020 10:12 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Messages & Codes (was Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes") You have to understand national politics: "we won't buy this product; the error messages are in English" [not French, Japanese, etc.] Even though you are of course right, "diskette in drive" is more understandable to the average French speaker than !! Sys01475 Charles -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Timothy Sipples Sent: Thursday, June 11, 2020 1:42 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Messages & Codes (was Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes") This pair of error messages was a design mistake: OS/2 !! Sys01475 OS/2 !! Sys02027 That's a case of national language considerations run amok. That was the only pair of messages you saw on your screen when you formatted a diskette with OS/2, left the diskette in the primary drive, and rebooted the typical PC of that era (that didn't automatically try to boot from another device when there was a diskette in the primary drive). A diskette's boot sector doesn't have much room, so the designers had to be concise. They wanted to include at least one error code, and they did. But then instead of some portion of the planet not understanding what happened, very nearly the entire planet didn't understand what happened. :-) A better design would have used a global message like this: OS/2 SYS01475: Diskette in Drive! That's exactly the same number of characters, assuming the new line was one character. (If not, the colon could have been omitted.) Yes, "Diskette in Drive!" is technically English, but even so it would have been much more broadly, globally understood than mystery error codes. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
