Hex (Discworld) - Messages

Messages

Hex has a habit of spewing bizarre messages. Its "Out of Cheese" error from Interesting Times caught the fancy of many information technology employees, turning up in real-word systems and in programming books.

It alludes to the many confusing error messages that technology users have had to put up with in the Information Age. "Out of Paper" (also seen as "PC LOAD LETTER" for some printers) is familiar to many office workers. "Redo From Start" was the somewhat unhelpful error message produced by the BASIC interpreter in many early home computers when non-numeric characters were entered in response to a prompt for numerical input. Other inscrutable Hex-talk includes:

+++Mr. Jelly! Mr. Jelly!+++ +++Error At Address: 14, Treacle Mine Road, Ankh-Morpork+++ +++MELON MELON MELON+++ +++Divide By Cucumber Error. Please Reinstall Universe And Reboot +++ +++Whoops! Here Comes The Cheese! +++ +++Oneoneoneoneoneoneone+++

Hex's messages are often delimited by the sequence +++, which recalls the escape sequence in the Hayes command set, a standard used in dial-up modems.

In the PlayStation game Discworld II: Missing, Presumed..., if the player asks the question "Why?", Hex spits out various error messages different from those in the books:

*Blip* *Blip* *Blip* End of Cheese Error *Blip* *Blip* *Blip* Can Not Find Drive Z: *Blip* *Blip* *Blip* Unknown Application Error *Blip* *Blip* *Blip* Please Reboot Universe *Blip* *Blip* *Blip* Year Of The Sloth *Blip* *Blip* *Blip*

This echoes the science-fiction "does not compute" cliché, in which the protagonist confuses, locks up, or destroys a dangerous computer by giving it riddles or making paradoxical statements, like: "Everything I say is a lie."