A zillion years ago I was able to see some of the internal communications around the development of OS/2. One topic was the way that non-system floppies would (

A zillion years ago I was able to see some of the internal communications around the development of OS/2. One topic was the way that non-system floppies would (fail to) boot when left in the PC. What the user would see was something like (I forget the exact numbers) SYS!012345 SYS!876543 ...and they were supposed to go look that up in some reference book to see what it meant. The question was why they weren't outputting something human readable like "Unable to boot from non-system floppy". And the answer to that question was that, as an international company, they couldn't expect everyone to understand English. So why not output multiple different languages? Well, the code to output the message has to fit in the floppy's boot sector, so the space is very tight. And so there was discussion about whether it makes sense to give up having only 99% of users understand it, and instead have 0% understanding. I think the killer argument was the person who suggested outputting a message something like ______ | |__| | | () | X |______| which would just barely fit, and I think is almost universally understandable. Of course, the inscrutable message eventually stuck anyway.