10 ms·
Ask HN: Who Remembers “Abort. Retry. Fail?”
Just came back to me now.
- mikewarot 4y agoJust how old is everyone here? I'm 59, and MS-DOS didn't come along until much later than my first computer use.
- zwieback 4y ago56 - just old enough to have done a lot of work on PDPs and VAXs before PCs took over science labs.
- eternalban 4y agoI 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 https://www.unige.ch/medecine/nouspikel/ti99/titechpages.htm
- sedan_baklazhan 4y ago39 - my first PC was a 80486, my first computer ever used was a Soviet PDP-11 clone school PC.
- Gordonjcp 4y ago49 - 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
- jfk13 4y agoLikewise... 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.
- digitalsankhara 4y ago65 - 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)
- Izkata 4y ago34, 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).
- StanislavPetrov 4y ago48, got my start on a Timex Sinclair in 1982!
- tibbydudeza 4y agoSadly I do and Dos Interrupt Handler 21h.
- lamontcg 4y agoCALL -151
- mikece 4y agoThe error message or the column by John C. Dvorak?
- jdlyga 4y agoI 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?
- justsomehnguy 4y ago> 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.
- twic 4y agoabort: panic!("just stop everything"); fail: return Err("let someone try to handle this");
- bitwize 4y agoAbort: 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
- mistertoolbox 4y agoI 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.
- gnatman 4y agoWhoa... Flashback to me trying to launch Oregon Trail or Lemmings from a beat up 5.25 floppy.
- mobilio 4y agoAlso some time shows Ignore.
- oakwhiz 4y agoThis only seemed to work maybe 1 in every 20 times. Felt a bit like playing Jenga with program state.
- sethx 4y agohttps://www.dailymotion.com/playlist/x5ysjb https://www.dailymotion.com/playlist/x5ysjb 13:35 for your pleasure Celebrity deathmatch with bill gates in an iconic abort retry fail moment
- evilbob93 4y agolaser holes.
- mandevil 4y agoThe actual error message in DOS or the back page of PC Magazine?
- dpryden 4y agoI 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.
- tomcam 4y agoThat column could be screamingly funny. I followed the author afterwards but he never reached that peak of hilarity again.
- adamrmcd 4y agoA 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 4y agoExtended 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 4y ago> 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 4y agoDOS4/GW and Desqview were the two main extended memory systems IIRC. Manuals in storage, sorry I can't look up here.
- LeoPanthera 4y agoExtended 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.
- calt 4y ago“‘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 4y agoIts available on Good Old Games along with the sequel
- omnibrain 4y ago> 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 4y agoProbably 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".
- scombridae 4y agoAs a kid I didn't see the point of abort, fail, and ignore. How about something simple like "Retry? (y/n) ".
- glonq 4y ago"Microsoft veteran demystifies Abort, Retry, Fail DOS error" https://www.theregister.com/2022/02/14/dave_plummer_abort_retry_fail/ https://www.theregister.com/2022/02/14/dave_plummer_abort_re...
- rep_movsd 4y agoLovingly called "ARF" like: "The program ARFed as soon as I ejected the floppy"
- herodoturtle 4y agoReminded me of “Arf Arf Got you!”, another old school reference.
- PreInternet01 4y agoWell, 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.
- linuxlizard 4y agoI was a big fan of SAFARI. Popped up that big scary red screen with lots of interesting info.
- PreInternet01 4y agoYup, 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...
- graderjs 4y agoThanks for reminding me of Terminate and Stay Resident :)
- paultopia 4y agoAaaah, 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.
- fhars 4y agoI think a related joke was "Who is General Failure, and why is he reading my harddisk?"
- jfk13 4y agoI remember it as "...and what the fsck is he doing reading my disk?"
- drewzero1 4y agoI still love that joke. Read it first in DOS for Dummies which came with an old computer I picked up at a rummage sale in the late 90s. I studied that book inside and out; never realized it was the very first "For Dummies" book.
- csours 4y agoRemember 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 4y agoI'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.
- mdip 4y agoAh, 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.
- dannywarner 4y agoRight up there with "On Error Resume Next" from the world of VB!
- layer8 4y agoThat’s the default for shell scripts.
- cookie_monsta 4y ago> It was the first time DOS made my mom cry. Nice piece of redirection there :P
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- geocrasher 4y agoThe real question is, who remembers how to get into the controller BIOS on an ISA MFM/RLL controller?
- adamrmcd 4y agoYou randomly try changing every IRQ jumper?
- gruturo 4y agodebug 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 4y agoThis 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 4y agoLOL 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.
- Waterluvian 4y agoI 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 4y ago> to set up DMA, IRQ, PORT, etc. settings to make sound work 220 5 1
- amalcon 4y agoIt 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.
- ninkendo 4y agoThe first word I think ever learned to spell as a young child was SIERRA. Because SIERRA.EXE was the executable for a lot of games like King’s Quest and The Black Cauldron… I remember only partially knowing how to read, and basically associating the shapes of a lot of the words/letters with things happening in the game, without really understanding them. Typing “kick cat” in King’s Quest 3 was the highlight of my computing experience back then. https://youtu.be/rFp0I5nalLs https://youtu.be/rFp0I5nalLs
- zwieback 4y agoI 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.
- drewzero1 4y agoFjjjt fjjjt, fjjjt fjjjt fjjjjjt... chunk chunk chunk. I didn't even have to look at the screen to know what it was going to say.
- LeoPanthera 4y agoI'm British, and very old, so I remember: Block? Data? Rewind Tape
- Gordonjcp 4y agoI 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 ;-)
- bluedino 4y agoThe PC Magazine last page?
- rco8786 4y agoDefinitely. I'm still not sure what the difference between Abort and Fail is though.
- kristopolous 4y agoAbort 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
- kloch 4y agoIt 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).
- lxe 4y agoYou brought up memories of my first PC: Elektronika 1841 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ES_PEVM 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.
- t312227 4y agoif you are born before lets say at least 1990: who doesn't :))
- valbaca 4y agoborn in '88 and didn't get the reference
- iannshan 4y agoEnjoy this classic https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/midnight.dreary.txt https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/midnight.dreary.txt
- Joeboy 4y agoIt 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVL-zZnD3VU
- guenthert 4y agoSure we do. It's not that long ago. We're not senile just yet -- ask in twenty, twenty-five years again.
- LargoLasskhyfv 4y agoI remember Keyboard not connected. Press F1 to continue. (BIOS)
- anyfoo 4y agoPeople 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 4y agoThe 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 4y agoIs 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 4y agoPersonally, 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.
- trashface 4y agoRemember it? Its my life motto.
- squokko 4y agoYep - and I never put two and two together on "Retry" and called it "Reh-tree."
- 1attice 4y agoright before my REISUB era ;)
- anyfoo 4y agoThat 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 4y agoI 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 4y agoHere's an explanation of each one: https://askubuntu.com/questions/926461/whats-the-difference-between-the-magic-reisub-reset-and-holding-down-the-power 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.
- Gordonjcp 4y agoI remember it from CP/M. Yes, I'm quite old.
- exabrial 4y agoSorry, Command Not Found
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- runjake 4y agoI 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guru_Meditation
- par 4y agothe DOS command?
- pizlonator 4y agoGood times. Reminds me of learning to program in GWBASIC
- hyperman1 4y agoThere 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 4y agoWho 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 4y agoYou 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.
- ShuffleBoard 4y agoNon-Maskable Interrupt
- pshc 4y agoAt least on my machine, Retry never worked.
- euroderf 4y agoUsing debug to patch it to "Abhor, Retch, Ignite"
- kerblang 4y agoMySQL 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 4y agoI always loved the “Nevermore” poem involving this famous error [0] [0] https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/midnight.dreary.html https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/midnight.dreary.html
- imwillofficial 4y agoWow that takes me back!
- entropie 4y agothe ruby keywords?
- ElfinTrousers 4y agoShow of hands here for LOAD "*", 8, 1?
- justusthane 4y agoPC LOAD LETTER
- 51Cards 4y agoI remember it well! Many many years of listening to a floppy drive grind looking for a disk or a bad sector.
- quantified 4y agoAka "labor, fiery tart" from the anagram generators?
- mrlonglong 4y agoI 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.
- kazinator 4y agoAbort/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.
- warrenm 4y agoThe comic? Or the old DOS?Windows prompt? Or both? :)
- DoneWithAllThat 4y agoI 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.
- LVB 4y agoYes. And I might also remember reaching for RECOVER.COM in desperation and being pretty disappointed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recover_(command) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recover_(command)
- not_your_mentat 4y agoabort@retry.fail was my default address for testing for a long, long time.
- Jemm 4y agoI 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?"
- lloydatkinson 4y agoI worked on some software that had the concept of "solutions". It was very common to see ones named "The Final Solution" haha.
- layer8 4y agoAbort/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.
- randombits0 4y agoWho is General Failure and why is he reading my hard drive?
- zhrvoj 4y agoI 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...
- BLKNSLVR 4y agoI still have the CD somewhere. https://www.discogs.com/master/106568-White-Town-Abort-Retry-Fail_ https://www.discogs.com/master/106568-White-Town-Abort-Retry... Trumpet sample re-sampled in 2020 by Dua Lipa 1996. How time flies...
- mxuribe 4y agoI 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!
- roryisok 4y ago"Not ready reading drive A: Abort / retry / fail" Now I suddenly want to play SimCity
- Beldin 4y agoSpeaking of which: <Shift>-<Alt>-<Shift> for turbo.
- futhey 4y agoYes, on Dos 5. Retry first, which never worked. Then Fail to see if the program can handle the issue, which also never worked. And if not, abort (to kill the program).