Any message whose action is given as "contact your systems programmer" is just as bad. Has IBM finally gotten rid of all of those?
-- Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3 ________________________________________ From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] on behalf of Timothy Sipples [sipp...@sg.ibm.com] Sent: Thursday, June 11, 2020 4:42 AM To: IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU 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. Even this one would have been better: OS/2 SYS01475 Unbootable Diskette Or: SYS01475: Data Diskette in Drive! Pretty much anything with the word "Diskette" (the term IBM preferred instead of "Floppy") would have given users a clue. Even this: OS/2 !! Sys01475 No Boot Diskette - - - - - - - - - - Timothy Sipples I.T. Architect Executive Digital Asset & Other Industry Solutions IBM Z & LinuxONE - - - - - - - - - - E-Mail: sipp...@sg.ibm.com ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
