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.
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.
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.
IIRC "The Design of Everyday Things" makes a point that most devices have poorly explained errors (beeps, error codes etc) because nobody chooses what to buy based on how it acts when it's failing, so there's no incentive to spend money on it. For hardware, the cost is quite literal, as having a better display just to show error messages is a lot more expensive than a beeper.
With software, it's probably a matter of prioritization, why invest into explaining errors when you can work on preventing them? Not that this error prevention always works out, but still.
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?"
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.
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".
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.)
The 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
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.
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.
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.
> 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).
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.
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.
> 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).
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...
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.)
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!
Brings back memories. I remember my parents being astonished when little me fixed our old IBM PC/XT, which was not booting from the hard disk using a low level format „hack“ I found in a copy of PC magazine [0]. The trick was to boot from floppy first and trigger a BIOS interrupt to do the low level format.
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.
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 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.
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 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 ;-)
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 ...
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.
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.
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.
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.)
PCI could be hot-pluggable actually. It requires a lot of fiddly bits though. Especially, you need to setup enough address space for the cards without knowing what they are.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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 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?"
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.
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).
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
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.]
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).
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)
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).
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.
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
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.
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.