The Kindness of Error Messages
The first error messages were not written for humans. They were written for engineers — people who already understood the machine and needed only a code, a register address, a hexadecimal breadcrumb to locate the fault. The machine was expensive. The human’s time was not. ABEND 0C7. SEGFAULT. TRAP 11. These weren’t communications. They were shorthand between peers — the machine and the person who built it, speaking a shared language that excluded everyone else. If you didn’t understand, you weren’t supposed to be there. ...