Techie Found An Error Message So Rude The CEO Of IBM Apologized For It
The Register, Monday, October 6th, 2025
This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Saul" who shared a story from his time working for an IBM dealer in the late 1980s. "I'd taught myself how to use a PC/DOS and got the job because I knew more about PCs than the hiring manager or the team lead," Saul told Who, Me? On his first day at the coal face, his boss asked him to learn something new: UNIX.
Saul welcomed that suggestion and over the next six months became so proficient in IBM's AIX he built what he described as "a fairly not bad, multi-user, fault reporting system with Informix."
That feat earned him extra responsibilities helping the IBM dealer's pre-sales team, plus work building and installing customer systems.
While Saul enjoyed exploring and working with AIX, the PC's rise and rise was by then inexorable.