Who Remembers “Abort. Retry. Fail?”
Just came back to me now.
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.
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.
“‘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.
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.)
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
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.
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.
I think a related joke was "Who is General Failure, and why is he reading my harddisk?"
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!
I'm British, and very old, so I remember:
Block?
Data?
Rewind Tape
The error message or the column by John C. Dvorak?
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.
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.
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.
The actual error message in DOS or the back page of PC Magazine?
I remember Keyboard not connected. Press F1 to continue. (BIOS)
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?
The real question is, who remembers how to get into the controller BIOS on an ISA MFM/RLL controller?
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.
Remember it? Its my life motto.
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!
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?"
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...
Who is General Failure and why is he reading my hard drive?
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.
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.
Show of hands here for LOAD "*", 8, 1?
Lovingly called "ARF" like: "The program ARFed as soon as I ejected the floppy"
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.
Yes, 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).
As a kid I didn't see the point of abort, fail, and ignore. How about
something simple like "Retry? (y/n) ".
Just how old is everyone here? I'm 59, and MS-DOS didn't come along until much later than my first computer use.
Sure we do. It's not that long ago. We're not senile just yet -- ask in twenty, twenty-five years again.
I remember it well! Many many years of listening to a floppy drive grind looking for a disk or a bad sector.
Yep - and I never put two and two together on "Retry" and called it "Reh-tree."
Whoa... Flashback to me trying to launch Oregon Trail or Lemmings from a beat up 5.25 floppy.
"Not ready reading drive A:
Abort / retry / fail"
Now I suddenly want to play SimCity
Definitely. I'm still not sure what the difference between Abort and Fail is though.
right before my REISUB era ;)
abort@retry.fail was my default address for testing for a long, long time.
Speaking of which: -- for turbo.
The PC Magazine last page?
if you are born before lets say at least 1990: who doesn't :))
Aka "labor, fiery tart" from the anagram generators?
Using debug to patch it to "Abhor, Retch, Ignite"
Good times. Reminds me of learning to program in GWBASIC
I remember it from CP/M. Yes, I'm quite old.
At least on my machine, Retry never worked.
The comic? Or the old DOS?Windows prompt?
Or both?
:)
Sadly I do and Dos Interrupt Handler 21h.
Also some time shows Ignore.