(A)bort? (R)etry? (F)ail?

Rip John C. Dvorak, writer of the Abort/Retry/Fail column from PC Magazine.

On a different note, never underestimate the value of a modal dialog that gives you a chance to retry an IO operation that failed. Loose USB cables and network shares over Wifi can make those happen a lot more often.

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roryirvine 4 days ago | parent [-]

And it came from the days of floppy disks, so we often needed the chance to put the correct disk back in the right drive!

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doubled112 4 days ago | parent [-]

When the game comes on 14 floppy disks, sometimes you forget how to count in the excitement.

	▲	collingreen 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		Keeping one of the disks from the pile was peak bff/sibling rivalry antics. It's like keeping out one of the pieces of the puzzle so nobody can finish it but you.

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adiabatichottub 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

As I remember, standard operating procedure was to retry 4 or 5 times, then turn off the computer and walk away in frustration.

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somat 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

What always got me at the time was retry is understandable, but what the heck is the difference between abort and fail? I don't want to complain too much it was probably in the manual, but as a young teen during my DOS days (there are manuals? read?) The distinction was lost on me.

My understanding today is that one of them(fail?) gives the application a chance to do something clever. Did any application actually handle this gracefully? Something like, Disk 11/15 error(fail) Please put in recovery parity disk.