[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Who Remembers "Abort. Retry. Fail?"
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Ask HN: Who Remembers "Abort. Retry. Fail?"
Just came back to me now.
Author : graderjs
Score : 173 points
Date : 2022-12-13 16:00 UTC (7 hours ago)
| Joeboy wrote:
| It was (among other things) the name of an album by White Town,
| aka Jyoti Mishra, best known for the hit single Your Woman.
| Apparently it was made on an Atari ST with a sequencing program
| that was given away free on the front of a magazine.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVL-zZnD3VU
| lxe wrote:
| You brought up memories of my first PC: Elektronika 1841
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ES_PEVM), a soviet IBM PC clone.
| We had it in the mid-90s, even though it was already obsolete. It
| had 2 5 inch floppy drives, 256 KB of RAM (my dad upgraded to 512
| KB in 1997 I think?). We even had a monochrome printer.
|
| I think we were the only family in my elementary school who had a
| computer for a few years, until modern PCs became more within
| reach of some folks.
| rep_movsd wrote:
| Lovingly called "ARF" like: "The program ARFed as soon as I
| ejected the floppy"
| herodoturtle wrote:
| Reminded me of "Arf Arf Got you!", another old school
| reference.
| mobilio wrote:
| Also some time shows Ignore.
| oakwhiz wrote:
| This only seemed to work maybe 1 in every 20 times. Felt a bit
| like playing Jenga with program state.
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| I remember Keyboard not connected. Press F1 to continue. (BIOS)
| anyfoo wrote:
| People give that one a lot of crap, but what it meant was just
| "press F1 _after connecting the keyboard_ ". In later BIOSes at
| least the error could usually be turned off, if you want to
| boot without a keyboard.
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| The thing is, it should have shown: Power off to reconnect
| Keyboard. At least up to PS/2-style connectors. Because you
| could short/blow out the onboard Super-IO doing that, while
| powered on.
| anyfoo wrote:
| Is that actually true? I'm not convinced IBM and other PC
| manufacturers made such a mistake, but I'm happy to be
| proven wrong. It sounds a lot like it could be some sort of
| "common wisdom", because some ports presumably were
| dangerous to hotplug, so laypeople were just told to
| generally be cautious.
|
| FWIW, I never followed that advice for anything as far as I
| can remember (save for really obvious stuff like ISA or PCI
| cards, or in professional settings where I was following
| some procedure), and nothing ever blew up. Could have been
| lucky.
|
| (Super-IO was very late, by the way, it was 8042s and
| derivative microcontrollers originally.)
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| Hey, regarding the really obvious stuff like PCI cards...
|
| I once unplugged a NCR/Symbios Logic SCSI-controller from
| a running system.
|
| And plugged it back in _very carefully_ after a while.
|
| While running graphically under NetBSD with 1.5GB Virtual
| Channel Memory. (Slightly better SD-RAM, only supported
| by some chipsets)
|
| Monitor went _ZONK_ , because NetBSD switched to text-
| mode console, which 21" Supersync barely supported,
| spewed endless alerts, after alerts.
|
| After replugging something like found controller,
| resetting, found disk(s), resetting, alerts gone,
| switching back to X.
|
| Magic.
|
| Didn't even have filesystem errors, which I checked for
| after that stunt.
|
| Which btw. didn't work with an Adaptec2940 fast and wide.
|
| Nor Linux, in whichever config.
|
| Some hot plugging, eh? :-)
| anyfoo wrote:
| Heh, amazing. I love when stuff like this "works out".
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| Personally, I've been lucky. Though I _have_ seen sparks
| while plugging while powered. Also I 've got many broken
| systems where at least one port (of two) was broken, but
| could be compensated by 'Y-wire' where you'd put mouse
| and keyboard via that Y-wire into the remaining port.
| Which later became some sort of pseudo-standard, cost
| cutting, because only one port is cheaper? I also seem to
| remember advertising on the package of better boards,
| which had protection against that.
| drivers99 wrote:
| I have fried a PS/2 port before by doing that. Once, in
| the 1990s, at work. That doesn't tell you how often it
| happens though because I haven't hot plugged in a PS/2
| device since then (and now I don't use them much
| anymore).
| VLM wrote:
| The smarter KVM switches, well, KV switches, would simulate
| a keyboard even if you're not connected to the server, but
| the dumber KV switches were dumb, so you'd have to select
| the rebooting server so it could see the keyboard. Then
| you'd adjust the bios so it doesn't require a keyboard to
| boot.
|
| That's just how it was in the old days.
| 51Cards wrote:
| I remember it well! Many many years of listening to a floppy
| drive grind looking for a disk or a bad sector.
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| I still have the CD somewhere.
|
| https://www.discogs.com/master/106568-White-Town-Abort-Retry...
|
| Trumpet sample re-sampled in 2020 by Dua Lipa
|
| 1996. How time flies...
| trashface wrote:
| Remember it? Its my life motto.
| pshc wrote:
| At least on my machine, Retry _never_ worked.
| quantified wrote:
| Aka "labor, fiery tart" from the anagram generators?
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| I remember it from CP/M. Yes, I'm quite old.
| warrenm wrote:
| The comic? Or the old DOS?Windows prompt?
|
| Or both?
|
| :)
| euroderf wrote:
| Using debug to patch it to "Abhor, Retch, Ignite"
| par wrote:
| the DOS command?
| sethx wrote:
| https://www.dailymotion.com/playlist/x5ysjb 13:35 for your
| pleasure Celebrity deathmatch with bill gates in an iconic abort
| retry fail moment
| DoneWithAllThat wrote:
| I moved in with some friends when I was 19 in a big geek
| household. A couple of the guys I knew well, others I only was
| acquaintances with but everyone was cool. One of the first nights
| one of the acquaintances was letting me use his computer and he
| was in the other room. Just to mess with him I yelled "Hey Peter
| what does not ready reading drive C abort retry fail mean?". Dude
| came charging in like a cannonball "WHAT DID YOU DO" to find me
| just sitting there laughing.
| jdlyga wrote:
| I saw this a lot as a kid. I never understood the difference
| between abort and fail. I'm guessing that fail also sends failure
| messages?
| twic wrote:
| abort: panic!("just stop everything");
|
| fail: return Err("let someone try to handle
| this");
| bitwize wrote:
| Abort: stop run, return to DOS
|
| Retry: retry the operation (great after you put a floppy in the
| drive)
|
| Fail: return from system call with an error code, program keeps
| running
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| > I'm guessing that fail also sends failure messages?
|
| Yes.
|
| Abort just... aborts everything, potentially dropping you to
| the prompt.
|
| Fail responds with an error and let the software handle what to
| do now.
| mistertoolbox wrote:
| I once saw the Abort, Retry, Fail prompt on a computer at my
| mom's office as a kid while it was reading a floppy disk and,
| being ~8 years old or so, pressed F. The A: drive went missing
| when it dumped back to the prompt and I got blamed. Looking
| back after reading the article, guess I was a victim of bad
| timing and an already failing drive, but that moment instilled
| a _healthy_ fear of the Fail option for me.
| LVB wrote:
| Yes. And I might also remember reaching for RECOVER.COM in
| desperation and being pretty disappointed.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recover_(command)
| not_your_mentat wrote:
| abort@retry.fail was my default address for testing for a long,
| long time.
| PreInternet01 wrote:
| 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.
| paultopia wrote:
| 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.
| mywittyname wrote:
| 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.
| jonny_eh wrote:
| It's a mystery to me why they didn't add a line explaining
| it. Or even an option like "(E)xplain".
| ataylor284_ wrote:
| 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.
| linuxlizard wrote:
| I was a big fan of SAFARI. Popped up that big scary red screen
| with lots of interesting info.
| PreInternet01 wrote:
| 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...
| roryisok wrote:
| "Not ready reading drive A: Abort / retry / fail"
|
| Now I suddenly want to play SimCity
| fhars wrote:
| I think a related joke was "Who is General Failure, and why is he
| reading my harddisk?"
| jfk13 wrote:
| I remember it as "...and what the fsck is he doing reading my
| disk?"
| imwillofficial wrote:
| Wow that takes me back!
| lamontcg wrote:
| CALL -151
| csours wrote:
| Remember it? Yes.
|
| I use a UI with the option to cancel a workflow and when you
| select 'cancel' it comes up with a modal 'ok' or 'cancel'. Does
| cancel cancel the cancel? Or is it ok to cancel? WE CAN USE MORE
| THAN ONE WORD PEOPLE. We have the bytes!
| gpderetta wrote:
| I've routinely interacted with a modal dialog for cancelling a
| ticket that will helpfully show two buttons: cancel or cancel.
|
| You couldn't make up this stuff.
| iannshan wrote:
| Enjoy this classic
| https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/midnight.dreary.txt
| evilbob93 wrote:
| laser holes.
| entropie wrote:
| the ruby keywords?
| 1attice wrote:
| right before my REISUB era ;)
| anyfoo wrote:
| That one always bothered me, I'm not sure there was a full
| rationale for it. To me, it always seemed that EUB (terminate,
| unmount, boot) should be sufficient.
| 1attice wrote:
| I just always associated it with that ST:TNG episode where
| Riker gets hooked on some sort of VR video game from a planet
| I always misremember as 'REISUB 9'
|
| But the association allowed me to remember the abbreviation.
| I called it the Riker Maneuver
| Izkata wrote:
| Here's an explanation of each one:
| https://askubuntu.com/questions/926461/whats-the-
| difference-...
|
| Basically "E" and "S" were an attempt to save as much data as
| possible and "R" may not be needed (but including it created
| the word "busier" backwards). I'm guessing "I" may have been
| to be sure "U" wouldn't get stuck somehow, but don't really
| know.
| mrlonglong wrote:
| I also remember the "General Failure reading" error messages.
| There's an old joke about who General Failure was and why he was
| reading the disk.
| hyperman1 wrote:
| There was also the joke: Who is general failure, and why is he
| reading drive A:?
|
| Making that joke tended to mean someone just lost something
| important.
| xtracto wrote:
| Who is this General Failure and why is he trying to read drive
| A:?
|
| That's how I remember it! I also remember a cartoon of someone
| calling support telling them that "his computer is not working
| and makes weird sounds", the support person asks: "Did you
| backup?" to what the terrified user asks back: "Why? is it
| going to explode?"
| iso1631 wrote:
| You start with Private Variable, which you can't access so
| that causes a Major Problem. Before you know it Kernel Panic
| is involved, then you have a General Failure and it all goes
| to pot.
| t312227 wrote:
| if you are born before lets say at least 1990: who doesn't :))
| valbaca wrote:
| born in '88 and didn't get the reference
| Beldin wrote:
| Speaking of which: <Shift>-<Alt>-<Shift> for turbo.
| mikewarot wrote:
| Just how old is everyone here? I'm 59, and MS-DOS didn't come
| along until much later than my first computer use.
| zwieback wrote:
| 56 - just old enough to have done a lot of work on PDPs and
| VAXs before PCs took over science labs.
| sedan_baklazhan wrote:
| 39 - my first PC was a 80486, my first computer ever used was a
| Soviet PDP-11 clone school PC.
| Izkata wrote:
| 34, first family computer was Windows 98 though I'd used some
| sort of Mac at school the year before. I also inherited my
| dad's old Windows 3.1 laptop right around that time and got
| some DOS experience from there (so I do remember
| Abort/Retry/Fail).
| jfk13 wrote:
| Likewise... by the time I got my hands on MS-DOS, I'd tinkered
| with a half-dozen or so other systems, from Commodore PET to
| IBM System/370.
| eternalban wrote:
| I had to check the date on ms-dos (1981) so I'm pretty sure I
| got my T1-99/4A (first computer) that same year. It's a pretty
| sweet machine. Still have it, just need a monitor solution to
| fire it up.
|
| [I think the first time I touched ms-dos was _years_ later
| because of getting a Thinkpad. My path was VMS - > OS/2 -> Mac
| OS (because of Java) and then *nixes.]
|
| [1]:
| https://www.unige.ch/medecine/nouspikel/ti99/titechpages.htm
| digitalsankhara wrote:
| 65 - First home computer, ZX81. First college course, FORTRAN
| on hand punched cards. Response to first viewing of a 10MB
| Winchester disk in the lab...oooh, incredible!
|
| Still working professionally in information analytics/coding
| (UK National Health Service)
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| 49 - the very first home computer I ever used was Tony van der
| Kuyl's Apple II in his kitchen in Dundee, playing the "Lemonade
| Stand Game" wih his son Chris, who would of course go on to do
| rather well for himself out of computer games. I still remember
| the green screen monitor with its distinctive 15.7kHz whistle
| and the big rainbow-coloured ribbon cables to the two disk
| drives sitting under it :-)
|
| The first computer I owned was a ZX81 that my parents bought me
| when I was about 8, and (around roughly the same time) a ZX
| Spectrum for Christmas 1983 and a Jupiter Ace which a friend of
| the family bought and couldn't get his head round - and which
| didn't have Manic Miner or Atic Atac, so he got a Spectrum
| instead. The Jupiter Ace gave me my long-standing love of
| Forth, which I will attempt to use on any kind of
| microprocessor I can get my hands on (Z80, 6809/63C09, 6502,
| 68000, and PDP11 so far).
|
| The first PC-like machine I used was maybe a little later, and
| was an ACT Sirius, with an absolutely gorgeous keyboard and a
| monitor with a kind mesh-like thing bonded to the screen as an
| anti-glare thing, and disks that spun up and down at different
| speeds. I did some stuff for school in WordStar (vim has become
| my muscle-memory-first-language, but really the WordStar
| keystrokes are just under the surface) and printed it out on
| the screechy howly Epson MX80. Then came the ACT Apricot with a
| flappy door over the drives and a little LCD and softkeys on
| the keyboard - a genius idea that it would take over 30 years
| for Apple to reinvent with the TouchBar :-D
| randombits0 wrote:
| Who is General Failure and why is he reading my hard drive?
| mikece wrote:
| The error message or the column by John C. Dvorak?
| mandevil wrote:
| The actual error message in DOS or the back page of PC Magazine?
| dpryden wrote:
| I was actually expecting a discussion of the PC Magazine humor
| page, and was disappointed when I clicked through.
|
| It did make me go pick up an old copy of PC Magazine from 1995
| from the other side of the room and start leafing through it,
| though.
| kerblang wrote:
| MySQL Workbench actually carries on the tradition - I get it
| about twice a week after leaving it running overnight. I still
| haven't decided which button is best to click but I think they
| all give the same result... per tradition.
| teeray wrote:
| I always loved the "Nevermore" poem involving this famous error
| [0]
|
| [0] https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/midnight.dreary.html
| pizlonator wrote:
| Good times. Reminds me of learning to program in GWBASIC
| adamrmcd wrote:
| A random thought from the same era popped in my head a few days
| ago:
|
| > What was the difference between extended memory and expanded
| memory?
|
| 10yo me never did figure out why Kings Quest would play with one
| and not the other.
| ghaff wrote:
| Extended memory was memory above 1MB that real mode DOS
| couldn't access directly but could through a driver that put
| processors capable of protected mode (the 286--sort of--and
| later) into protected mode temporarily.
|
| Expanded memory bank switched the additional memory into an
| area of high memory below 1MB.
|
| Basically, with DOS, a program had to be designed and the
| system configured for one or the other.
| anyfoo wrote:
| > that put processors capable of protected mode (the 286--
| sort of--and later) into protected mode temporarily.
|
| Or, on the 386 and later, permanently, running DOS as a vm86
| task instead. EMM386 and similar did that. It was very
| transparent, so you usually wouldn't notice, and even for
| programs that would like to drive protected mode themselves,
| there was an interface called DPMI (earlier VCPI) with which
| they could wrestle protected mode away from the memory
| manager (being the exception to "permanent").
|
| DOS4/GW, which most probably know from DOOM and other games,
| used that interface.
|
| For software that did not use DPMI/VCPI, you usually got a
| message like "CPU already in protected mode" and had to
| disable your memory manager (usually by rebooting).
| quantified wrote:
| DOS4/GW and Desqview were the two main extended memory
| systems IIRC. Manuals in storage, sorry I can't look up
| here.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| Extended memory (XMS) is RAM that is addressed above the first
| megabyte of the address space.
|
| Expanded memory (EMS) is bank switched RAM that stays inside
| the 640K barrier.
| anyfoo wrote:
| > that stays inside the 640K barrier
|
| Yes, but to be super pedantic, it stayed within the 1MB
| barrier[1] that real mode could "officially" address. It was
| perfectly okay to have your EMS window above the A000h
| segment in memory, i.e. above 640k, if no device was using
| it.
|
| [1] Plus some change known as the "high memory area" (HMA),
| an artifact of how linear addresses are calculated from
| segment and offset.
| [deleted]
| zwieback wrote:
| Great question and a puzzler for me at first. From my
| perspective only expanded memory mattered (bank-switched block
| in memory space < 1MB) because all the apps I was using at
| first didn't support extended memory, which requires some
| switching to protected mode and the effort to add that to real
| mode programs was high.
|
| It's extra confusing because initially expanded memory was done
| with add-on cards and later extended memory drivers (on 286 and
| up) could emulate expanded.
| ghaff wrote:
| I don't really recall extended memory ever being used much on
| PCs running a real mode operating system like DOS. I
| definitely had an expanded memory add-on board at one point
| though.
|
| There were a lot of essentially kludges in the latter days of
| DOS that weren't really made unnecessary until Windows 3.0
| (or other OSs with a protected mode) and the 80386 and later
| processors.
| anyfoo wrote:
| > I don't really recall extended memory ever being used
| much on PCs running a real mode operating system like DOS.
|
| Extended Memory/XMS was pretty much a DOS thing, though.
| Anything using protected mode would not need it, and be
| able to just access the memory directly.
|
| > that weren't really made unnecessary until Windows 3.0
| (or other OSs with a protected mode)
|
| Windows 3.0 was "sort of" a protected mode OS. The actual
| Windows part ran as a 16bit task, similar to DOS in EMM386.
| That changed, again "sort of", with Windows 3.1. There was
| a thing called "Win32s" to run 32bit Windows applications,
| but most of Windows was still a single 16bit task.
|
| Windows NT was the real deal, though, shedding off its real
| mode roots with essentially a reimplementation. It only
| became part of the "mainstream" Windows versions with
| Windows XP (Windows 2000 was based on NT already, but still
| marketed alongside the "legacy" Windows 95/98/ME).
| efrecon wrote:
| I have a VERY vague memory that you could copy win32s
| from 3.1 into 3.0 to help running 32bit apps there. There
| might have been some fiddling with some sys.ini involved.
| But I might just be dreaming awake or something...
| anyfoo wrote:
| I can imagine that you're right! Would not be too
| surprising if Win32s was self-contained enough, and the
| differences between 3.0 and 3.1 small enough (although
| there were larger ones at least in some other aspects),
| that this could be done reasonably. (Though most apps
| were still likely to be 16 bit apps at that time, so not
| making any use of Win32s.)
| retrac wrote:
| The original 8086 processor could directly address up to 1
| megabyte of memory. The PC memory map allocated 640 KB of that
| for RAM.
|
| The first kind of further memory expansion was classic bank-
| switching. Within that 1 megabyte address space, you insert a
| window, say 32 kilobytes, which can be set to some 32 KB
| section of the extra memory. Same way more than 64 KB was added
| to systems like the Apple II, which could only address 64 KB.
| It's a pain to program for this kind of arrangement.
|
| Later, when running in protected mode, the Intel 286 would be
| able to directly address up to 16 megabytes of RAM, and the
| Intel 386 up to 4 gigabytes. Memory managers running in
| protected mode that could access this memory directly were
| created, which would handle memory for DOS applications.
|
| Those two approaches for > 1 MB are XMS and EMS. Though I can't
| remember which is which!
| danjc wrote:
| There's an excellent post on this at
| https://www.filfre.net/2017/04/the-640-k-barrier/
| calt wrote:
| "'Abort, Retry, Fail?' was the phrase some wormdog scrawled next
| to the door of the Edit Universe project room. And when the new
| dataspinners started working, fabricating their worlds on the
| huge organic comp systems, we'd remind them: if you see this
| message, always choose 'Retry.'"
|
| -- Bad'l Ron, Wakener, Morgan Polysoft
|
| From Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri (1999) when you discover Matter
| Editation
|
| That game was awesome. I remember seeing it in DOS games when I
| was younger and laughing at the joke.
| thedevindevops wrote:
| Its available on Good Old Games along with the sequel
| omnibrain wrote:
| > That game was awesome.
|
| And there was nothing like it ever since. Single aspects yes,
| but not the whole package of game mechanics and story.
| forgotusername6 wrote:
| Probably one of the best games of all time. I can still vividly
| remember most of those quotes. My favourite is "beware he who
| would deny you access to information, for in his heart he
| dreams himself your master".
| mdip wrote:
| Ah, yes. I actually remember the first time I learned what each
| of those options meant. My Dad had purchased an 8088 earlier that
| year and it was still a mystery to us (though Dad and I were the
| most proficient). One late evening while my Mom was finishing up
| something for work using "Word Star", she tried to print
| something but the printer was not turned on[0].
|
| The issue was quickly solved but the prompt remained on screen.
| The funny thing about the prompt was that, at the time (I was
| 8?), I didn't understand that it was asking a question and
| provided for more than one answer. Every time my Dad had seen the
| prompt, he hit "A" and redid whatever trivial thing he was doing.
| I had learned to do the same.
|
| Confidently, and very unhelpfully, I hit "A", watching the past
| hours work vanish. It was the first time DOS made my mom cry.
|
| [0] Forgive me, it was a while ago; it may have been unplugged or
| some other trivial issue.
| cookie_monsta wrote:
| > It was the first time DOS made my mom cry.
|
| Nice piece of redirection there :P
| dannywarner wrote:
| Right up there with "On Error Resume Next" from the world of
| VB!
| layer8 wrote:
| That's the default for shell scripts.
| geocrasher wrote:
| The real question is, who remembers how to get into the
| controller BIOS on an ISA MFM/RLL controller?
| gruturo wrote:
| debug
|
| g=c800:5
|
| What do I win? I didn't look it up!
|
| (But don't ask me what I had for lunch, can't remember)
| jensenbox wrote:
| This was what I would type into every computer I could find
| in Sears :)
|
| Seriously though - I had to run that for every PC we pushed
| out the door. In my later years I looked up what I was really
| doing - very interesting stuff indeed!
| geocrasher wrote:
| LOL yep that's it. I remember the first time I ran it, and
| this MAGICAL screen popped up. Didn't occur to me until later
| that I was loading a program from a memory address on a ROM.
| adamrmcd wrote:
| You randomly try changing every IRQ jumper?
| scombridae wrote:
| As a kid I didn't see the point of abort, fail, and ignore. How
| about something simple like "Retry? (y/n) ".
| bluedino wrote:
| The PC Magazine last page?
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I have fond memories of being a child and becoming an expert at
| DOS (and DOS-like) symbol manipulation.
|
| I had no clue what any of the commands meant, but I knew how to
| boot up an Apple II, load a disk, and type in the commands to run
| a game (at age 4), to set up DMA, IRQ, PORT, etc. settings to
| make sound work for Warcraft 1 or other DOS games (7 or 8), and
| many other things. But again, I had no clue what any of it meant.
| I just had an older brother write down the incantations and a lot
| of patience.
|
| That evolved a bit when I got into Robot Odyssey at age 9 or 10.
| I didn't know anything about logic gates, but because I have no
| Internet and I loved computers, I would bash my head against it
| for hours and hours and hours, organically learning how the logic
| gates differed from each other. (tangent: I loved this game so
| much despite it being far far too much for me. I did a
| presentation on logic gates, which was beyond my 4th grade
| teacher, and it got me put into an "enrichment" class, which in
| many ways screwed up grade school for me.)
| omnibrain wrote:
| > to set up DMA, IRQ, PORT, etc. settings to make sound work
|
| 220 5 1
| hyperman1 wrote:
| You forgot the SET BLASTER
| efields wrote:
| seeing these numbers just now unlocked something inside of me
| amalcon wrote:
| It sure made for an interesting sort of nostalgia when I (much
| later, when I hadn't messed with those settings for years)
| learned what Direct Memory Access and interrupt codes actually
| were.
| squokko wrote:
| Yep - and I never put two and two together on "Retry" and called
| it "Reh-tree."
| ElfinTrousers wrote:
| Show of hands here for LOAD "*", 8, 1?
| exabrial wrote:
| Sorry, Command Not Found
| gnatman wrote:
| Whoa... Flashback to me trying to launch Oregon Trail or Lemmings
| from a beat up 5.25 floppy.
| zwieback wrote:
| I remember that and the sound you often heard right before.
| Different for 5-1/4" and 3.5" disks
|
| I also remember the equivalent rattling on my Apple ][ disk drive
| right before something goes wrong.
| mxuribe wrote:
| I remember it...and i also remember how nervous i got when i saw
| this because it meant likely my floppy disk was not able to be
| read by the computer!
|
| Also, i happily recall years ago when i first saw "Abort. Retry.
| Fail?" printed on a fortune cookie from a local (and deliciously
| amazing) Chinese restaurant! I was so perplexed for a few moments
| until i realized that it was simply an error being spit
| out/printed in the manufcaturing process by whatever computer
| emits the fortunes for each cookie! I've seen it a couples of
| times since then too. Hilarious!
| tibbydudeza wrote:
| Sadly I do and Dos Interrupt Handler 21h.
| guenthert wrote:
| Sure we do. It's not that long ago. We're not senile just yet --
| ask in twenty, twenty-five years again.
| glonq wrote:
| "Microsoft veteran demystifies Abort, Retry, Fail DOS error"
|
| https://www.theregister.com/2022/02/14/dave_plummer_abort_re...
| kazinator wrote:
| Abort/Retry/Fail is a good idea; it's an example of a restartable
| exception. The software has identified a problem, and has ways of
| continuing around it rather than just bailing. Abort versus Fail
| is a useful distinction: abnormally exit the whole show, or just
| fail the operation. In Common Lisp we can do this kind of thing
| with conditions and restarts.
|
| You see retry mechanisms in modern software. For instance in
| Windows, installers will prompt you to retry an operation. For
| instance if you're reinstalling a program whose components are
| still running, it cannot copy those files over. You get prompted
| to stop the software and try that again, rather than bail the
| entire installer.
|
| Or bulk file copy operations give you the opportunity to do
| something with the one file that isn't working: like skip this
| file, retry, do this for all others from now on ...
|
| So Abort/Retry/Fail lives on.
| Jemm wrote:
| I remember a friend working on a Symantec project that was
| localized to German. They used a translation program which
| resulted in the dialog box basically saying "Have an abortion,
| Retry, Fail?"
| [deleted]
| runjake wrote:
| I vaguely do, but I was more in the land of Guru Meditation
| errors[1], for those familiar.
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guru_Meditation
| zhrvoj wrote:
| I would like to have this today with shitty, idiotic Microsoft
| OneDrive, which screwed up my desktop, files, made a terrible
| mess, after being enabled by my IT admin...
| rco8786 wrote:
| Definitely. I'm still not sure what the difference between Abort
| and Fail is though.
| kloch wrote:
| It doesn't matter. The appearance of the message itself usually
| meant the drive/disk was dead and there was nothing you could
| do about it.
|
| Even worse, programs almost never handled this gracefully so if
| you were trying to save your work it was effectively lost and
| you might as well ctrl-alt-del, even if you had another disk or
| drive (already attached).
| kristopolous wrote:
| Abort the program, send a fail code back to the software.
|
| So in the restricted world of 80s software without much
| ram/disk room for robust error handling the in practice
| difference is usually nothing
| layer8 wrote:
| Abort/Retry/Ignore (so slightly different) still quite commonly
| happens with some installers when they don't succeed in closing
| an application that uses a component they need to update.
| justusthane wrote:
| PC LOAD LETTER
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| I'm British, and very old, so I remember: Block?
| Data? Rewind Tape
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| I could actually hear the tones reading your comment.
|
| As an aside, if UoSAT-2/Oscar-11 is overhead it transmits tones
| identical to BBC Micro tape tones sending its (sadly now
| nonsense) telemetry back down to Earth, on 145.800MHz - and it
| was designed that way for a good reason ;-)
| ShuffleBoard wrote:
| Non-Maskable Interrupt
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