Nope!

-----Original Message-----
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <[email protected]> On Behalf Of 
Seymour J Metz
Sent: Thursday, June 11, 2020 10:04 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Messages & Codes (was Re: "Everyone wants to retire mainframes")

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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
https://apc01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http:%2F%2Fmason.gmu.edu%2F~smetz3&amp;data=02%7C01%7Callan.staller%40HCL.COM%7C5d87b6ba82604e73cc9308d80e18af0c%7C189de737c93a4f5a8b686f4ca9941912%7C0%7C0%7C637274846480687573&amp;sdata=u4EfCy7ayukIXREJxmztud3J1hWr7ajxrlmgk56KWpc%3D&amp;reserved=0

________________________________________
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [[email protected]] on behalf of 
Timothy Sipples [[email protected]]
Sent: Thursday, June 11, 2020 4:42 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.

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: [email protected]

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