Charles Mills wrote: >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
(a) This argument would have had more credibility if MS-DOS and its children (Windows 95, Windows 98, etc.) had sold poorly in particular countries for that reason. That's not how it worked out. (b) OK, try this: SYS01475 !! Diskette / Disquette In 32 bytes that string includes the language neutral (and still incomprehensible) error code *and* provides a powerful clue that covers English, French, German, Dutch, and some other languages exactly. It also covers Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese if you're willing to overlook an extra T. You even get the following languages pretty well or exactly (per Google, partial list): Afrikaans: disket Albanian Basque: diskete Bosnian: disketa Catalan: disquet Corsican: dischettu Croatian: disketa Czech: disketa Danish Esperanto: disketo Estonian: diskett Filipino Finish: disketti Galacian: disquete Haitian Creole: disk Icelandic: disklingur Indonesian: disket Latvian: diskete Lithuanian: diskelis Luxembourgish: diskett Malay: disket Maltese: disketta Norwegian: diskett Polish: dyskietka Romanian: dischetă Slovak: disketa Turkish: disket ....You get the idea. Anyway, this design defect (I'll call it that) is history. - - - - - - - - - - Timothy Sipples I.T. Architect Executive Digital Asset & Other Industry Solutions IBM Z & LinuxONE - - - - - - - - - - E-Mail: [email protected] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
