Hey Folks -
Tonight, while attempting to run a program on a floppy disk from the
command line prompt with Windows 95 pseudo-DOS, I got a really weird
error message: "A device connected to your system is not functioning".
>From the sounds being made by the floppy drive I suspected that I might
have had a damaged diskette. If that were just the case, then why, I
wondered, did I not get the standard DOS error message:
"I/O error reading drive A:, (A)bort (R)etry (F)ail" ?
By investigation of the problem, I determined that I did indeed have a
defective floppy disk, and that was the only extent of the problem. This
was the first time I had ever seen such an error message in my experience
with pseudo-DOS.
If I were a novice computer user, I would be using Windows 95 all the time,
because I probably would have believed in the popular misconception that
Windows 95 is so much easier to understand than DOS. If I were a novice,
I would not yet have been able to instantly recognize the sound of a
floppy-drive read error. With an error message like the one first quoted,
I would have thought that I had a very serious hardware defect, and I
would have taken my computer to the repair shop right away.
I have a question: Why did the programmers of pseudo-DOS design it so as to
output such a horribly frightening and most meaningless error message?
"A device connected to your system is not functioning"
Sam Heywood
-- This mail was written by user of Arachne, the Ultimate Internet Client
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