ARF

Abort, Retry, Fail?

Maybe you remember DOS and the above question, to which you would respond by pressing the A, R, or F key on the keyboard.

What I'm amused about is not anything technical. It's how we like to make things sound nicer. Sometime around Windows 95 we started to see the following instead.

Abort, Retry, Ignore?

"Fail" meant that one piece of software would tell another piece that it could not complete its task. Most of us didn't understand that and most of the time the failure was ignored - so, we got a new word, "Ignore" - less accurate and more helpful.

Next, the first word became a little less emotionally charged and the others - well, it seems like somebody just wanted to make it all sound nice. So, now we have this:

Cancel, Try Again, Continue?

Notice how these nice words help you decide what to do about 75b6bf7c and its friends.


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