She's Still Pumping Mud, Clancy

The excitement of SD West 2008 has come and gone for this year, but the legends just keep on growing. Here's an example: You recall I previously mentioned that of all the trivia thrown about at this year's Developer's Bowl, my favorite (submitted by Seapine's Alan See) was:

Q: The developers of the Texas Instruments 990 are credited with what all-time best error message?
A: "Shut 'Er Down Clancy, She's Pumping Mud!"

That led to hearing from reader Arnold Steed, who sent in this note:

I noticed the trivia questions in Dr. Dobb's included the infamous "Shut 'er down, Clancy" error message. I'm not sure if you're aware of the full story on that, but I actually worked with the fellow who wrote that error message. His name is Stu Barrett, and last I heard he was retired and pursuing his hobby of model rocketry. I worked for TI my senior year at UT, which was 86-87, and heard about the brouhaha from my boss (who had been working the tech support hotline when it hit the fan and may have actually been the first person to get a support call about it). Stu was notorious for using goofy error messages during development (the funniest one included his supervisor's home phone number) but he always took them out before it shipped. He left the Clancy one in because it was a debug message that should never have been displayed to a user, but a subsequent software update introduced a bug that caused the message to be displayed. The actual software the error showed up in was TIFORMS

Which, for trivia buffs, is great information to have. Then before I could track him down, I heard from Stu himself--and got the real scoop about Clancy, mud, and error messages, which I'm happy to share with you. Here's what Stu had to say:

A little history: This message was in the 'otherwise' clause of a case statement and should not have ever been issued. My software (TIFORMS) shipped and was in use for several years and then the 990 OS had an update where a new error code could be generated via strange keyboard input. After that OS release, someone found out how to get this error message and it started to be a cult. At first, the managers in the customer support area were livid about this so I kept a low profile. However, my supervisor knew about it and thought it was funny so he didn't rat me out. Several years later I was given a big promotion and as part of the dog any pony show, the supervisor gave be a framed copy of a PC Magazine article about the error message. By that time things had cooled off and I was considered a legendary part of the TI culture.

Stu was kind enough to answer a question or two, such as "Did you code any other humorous system messages or was that it?"

Not that I can remember. I do know that whenever I would mask interrupts (real programmers mask interrupts!), I would add a comment "Shields up Scotty." Likewise "Shields down" when I restored the interrupt mask. Really helped reading the assembly level code. Then there was a project I worked on around 1980 (pre PC) where I was doing the firmware on a 'smart terminal' (i.e. 3274/3278 SNA clone) and in the 'panic' routine I displayed information about the problem (e.g. PC, SP) and also had something along the lines of "Call 512.255.3294." This was the home phone number of my supervisor! The rest of the guys on the project thought that was hilarious. We would hit it quite often early in the development stage (hardware was wire-wrap 'breadboard'). One day the boss was walking though the lab and as luck would have it the error message was displayed. He looked at it and just about had a stroke! "You're not going to leave that in!!" We all got a good laugh and swore we would take it out before we burned the code into silicon. I did.

Worked for 30 years in the software industry. Did everything from OS's, firmware, transaction processors, communications, distributed systems, middleware, AI based applications (Lisp machines). It was a fun ride, and I did very well. Tried several times to do the management thing, but I was an engineer at heart.

Well, what do you expect? After all (and this is the best part) Stu was a Dr. Dobb's Journal subscriber.

-- Jonathan Erickson
jerickson@ddj.com

Posted by Jon Erickson at 01:46 PM  Permalink