Hello!
Clem by chance do you remember what the error message response was? It
would be interesting to see what phrases were used. For example, on
the IBM side of things, a fellow Adam and I both know, coded an entire
application so that everything it said and did would be in Klingonese.
No I do not remember which one it was, and what have you, I only
remember it surfacing during his talk at the IBM offices here in town,
during the early years of running Tux on the IBM S/390 systems.

I also find it strange that sometimes even Google is thinking in that language.
-----
Gregg C Levine gregg.drwho8@gmail.com
"This signature fought the Time Wars, time and again."

On Thu, Nov 21, 2019 at 3:09 PM Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:
>
>
>
> On Thu, Nov 21, 2019 at 2:53 PM Noel Chiappa <jnc@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> wrote:
>>
>>     > From: Arnold Robbins
>>
>>     > The Bell Labs guys in some ways were too.
>>
>> And there's the famous? story about the Multics error messages in Latin,
>> courtesty of Bernie Greenberg. One actually appeared at a customer site once,
>> whereupon hilarity ensued.
>
> One of my favorite stories of the same vein was a masscomp story.   We were chasing a rare event (as I recall it was when we first were debugging Multiprocessor stuff and it a lock order problem).  But we could not get the customers to tell us about what was happening, since the system recovered quickly, but we might kill a process. We had done a few releases and make a few changes but we could never reproduce it.
>
> I never knew who it was but someone ??Jack Burness if I had to guess?? put out a patch with a couple of error messages in Klingon and dumped a bunch of information.  Sure enough this was noticed, customer stopped, we got the needed data, as they reported the error.  But it was a high visibility customer, so the president (Mr. Potatohead) got a phone call.   Fossil (our boss) made us swear it would never happen again, but he defended us to the President.   We found the bug ;-)