Another Early Unix Story

[Richard Wilson]

One of my personal favorites concerns the guys at AT&T who decided to
put some error messages in the original kernel code in Latin... if you
ever saw one it was bad news because they were all of a "you should
NEVER see this error" nature.  A friend who knew Latin got a call from
someone who was trying to port Unix to a Burroughs Mainframe (don't ask
me why!) and he had gotten the following error message before the system
crashed hard:

Ecce! Hodie natus est pro geminus Radicus!

The translation: "Behold! Unto us is born a twin to Root!"

It has made me stop and think about what to put into those error
messages "that will never be seen...".  They will be seen...

The Latin error messages are now (appropriately) ancient history.

Richard Wilson