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Comment by PreInternet01 | Hacker News Reader

Well, it used to be "Abort, Retry, Ignore", an error message which was displayed by (MS|PC)-DOS upon I/O errors.

Abort: kill the requesting process. Retry: jump back to the entry point. Ignore: return as if the request was OK.

Later DOS versions added the "Fail" option, which was like "Ignore", but returned an actual error code. But since most applications were not aware of that, "Fail" was pretty much equivalent to "Ignore" for a long time.

A common third-party TSR at the time was PC Magazine's SAFARI: "Stay Away From Abort, Retry, Ignore". It would retry a few times, then ignore and/or fail depending on OS capabilities.

"Abort, Retry, Ignore (and/or Fail)" was pretty much the "BSOD" of the DOS generation: misunderstood, yet useful for those who understood its code.

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Aaaah, I remember "abort, retry, fail," but also remember never having any clue what the difference was supposed to be between "abort" and "fail." I'm now so pissed off that it was changed from the much clearer "abort, retry, ignore." Typical bloody microsoft terrible UI design.

To be fair to MS, this was all very new territory and they did spend a lot of time and money on UX research once Windows came around.

It's a mystery to me why they didn't add a line explaining it. Or even an option like "(E)xplain".

The first computers DOS ran on were from a different era. The first PC model had 16kb of memory and a 160kb floppy drive. There was literally no space for error messages.

DOS itself literally took up an entire disk. You'd have a DOS disk with the DOS utilities like fdisk.exe and format.exe, but you'd boot off that, then swap to a program disk to do actual stuff.

One early DOS IDE (Turbo Pascal 2 or 3 I think?) would prompt you to load error messages off disk at startup. If you chose not to, it would free up some memory for your project and you'd need to look up the messages in the manual by error number.

Only a few years later, every PC had a hard drive, >1MB storage on a floppy, and the full 1MB real mode address space filled with RAM.

IIRC "The Design of Everyday Things" makes a point that most devices have poorly explained errors (beeps, error codes etc) because nobody chooses what to buy based on how it acts when it's failing, so there's no incentive to spend money on it. For hardware, the cost is quite literal, as having a better display just to show error messages is a lot more expensive than a beeper.

With software, it's probably a matter of prioritization, why invest into explaining errors when you can work on preventing them? Not that this error prevention always works out, but still.

I was a big fan of SAFARI. Popped up that big scary red screen with lots of interesting info.

Yup, good times.

Of course, nowadays, the "intercept anything, do with it whatever you like" mindset is, at best, a security nightmare, and in any case an adware vector. "Hey, you just had an read error on your Seagate device... Don't you know Micropolis does a lot better?"

So, rightfully so. But I still miss those days...

Thanks for reminding me of Terminate and Stay Resident :)

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