(The title quote was, of course, adapted from Monkey, which is a delight, especially when dialogue like “Come out, you poofter!” suddenly bursts forth in accented English.)

But you knew all that. You even knew what a BSOD was, without clicking the link. My Sooper Sekrit Cabal Of Readers is comprised of only the intellectual elite, and most of us can do some math without removing our shoes. (Especially the Aussies: gotta love thongs (the footwear type)!

Since the Wiring Smoke got out of my last Winbox and I embraced the Penguin, I don’t tend to see any error messages borne on Microsoft products. Still, I have a long history of frustration with things made in Redmond.

Even before the azure loveliness of the Windows BSOD,

the spawn of the Billygates Gruff walked the land, in the form of the DOS error message.

I spotted this example in the wild yesterday, in a lift at Myer Toowoomba.


Schindler’s Lifts - not the movie, but yeah, same chap.


Well, luckily it didn’t crash, I guess.


Meh: couldn’t find the keyboard anyway….

And if you think that’s bad, the escalator in an adjacent shopping mall is snafu’d, and they’re waiting on a technician from Melbourne (about 1700km away) to come and fix it.

3 Responses to “In The Worlds Before BSOD, Primal Chaos Reigned…”

  1. Caitlin O'Connor says:

    And a cool (partial) self portrait thrown in for free!

  2. Him Brako says:

    Do the screens come with subtitles? Can’t make ‘em out. Have tried the “hold-laptop-far-away-to-smooth-the-pixels” technique and, in the absence of my proper reading glasses, both the “hold-to-nose-like-the-myopic-mole-I-am” and the “rest-distance-glasses-on-the-end-of-my-substancial-conker-and-vary-the-depth-till-something-comes-into-focus” methods.
    Somehow don’t think the reading glasses would make one iota of difference …

  3. ryno says:

    They go biggy if you clicky, Mr Beako. Anyhow, here ’tis.

    “0123456
    Starting MS-DOS…
    789

    A:\ >echo off

    General failure error reading Drive B
    Abort? Retry? Fail?”

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