The most useless error message would have to be "
Malfunction 54."
As remembered from my third-year
design course at
University:
In the
1980's, a
Canadian company designed a medical
computer system called the
Therac25 that used low-intensity
radiation to treat small
tumors in
cancer patients. The device consisted of a reinforced
lead box of sorts, with a bunch of medical devices inside, the most exciting of which was a
radioactive component that was
safely stored during most operations, unless the
nurse who was operating the machine didn't follow the set procedures.
The most exciting part of all of this was the
terminal attached to the device that controlled all of the functions, from simple
power-ups to
timing to the actual
treatments.
If the user of the machine did anything
wrong, it would come up with the message "
Malfunction ##", ## being a two digit number representing errors from the most
mundane (power of the machine not being turned on) to the extreme (patient in contact with radioactive materials for WAY too long). To make matters even worse, certain malfunction codes represented more than one type of
error. No other information would appear, and the error message could be cleared just by
pressing any key to continue.
The most notorious of these codes was "
Malfunction 54", a term now
notorious in its usage to denote useless error codes.
This error code, in fact,
killed approximately six people because the nurses had no idea what it meant. "Malfunction 54" indeed represented a dosage of radiation up to ten times more than the
safe limit for any sort of treatment.