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From: smb@ulysses.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.jokes
Subject: Re: bizarre error messages
Message-ID: <640@ulysses.UUCP>
Date: Sun, 9-Oct-83 12:42:33 EDT
Article-I.D.: ulysses.640
Posted: Sun Oct  9 12:42:33 1983
Date-Received: Mon, 10-Oct-83 08:39:10 EDT
References: <159@vortex.UUCP>
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill
Lines: 14

Then there was the error message reported in the January, 1982 issue of
Software Engineering Notes (the SIGSOFT newsletter).  It seems that GM
was installing a new release of Multics at a time when their hardware
was a bit flakey.  They were running the Multics equivalent of 'fsck'
when the message "Hodie natus est radici frater" appeared on the console.
The operations manager started asking the Catholics on his staff to
translate; someone finally figured it out.  Not that "Today unto the root
is born a brother" was that helpful....

It seems that this program builds an in-core tree corresponding to the
tree-structured file system.  If the root node of this tree ever has a
brother node, the above error message will appear.  This can only occur
as a result of extremely strange hardware failures, so the programmer wasn't
too worried about the message....