ERROR 143 & You

[UNIXcoffee928]

Over in the Programming section we were musing over the classic (drum-roll, please) ERROR 143 Serial Bus Data-Frame Checksum Error (audience laughs), with the implication being that, because such an error existed on the Atari, we, as kids, were tricked down the rabbit-hole into a life sentence of Engineering, lol. Now, I'm kinda interested in hearing other Atari users tales of horror from back when they first encountered our friend, ERROR 143, so here's your cue to tell your story!

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8vHhgh6oM0

[zzip]

Error 143 = "You keep feeding me tapes from that 3-pack of cassettes you bought for $1 down at the K-mart, then I'm not going to pretrend to try to retrieve your data"

Edited March 28, 2017 by zzip

[Guest]

but always 8 minutes into a 10-minute loader!

[Tempest]

Over in the Programming section we were musing over the classic (drum-roll, please) ERROR 143 Serial Bus Data-Frame Checksum Error (audience laughs), with the implication being that, because such an error existed on the Atari, we, as kids, were tricked down the rabbit-hole into a life sentence of Engineering, lol. Now, I'm kinda interested in hearing other Atari users tales of horror from back when they first encountered our friend, ERROR 143, so here's your cue to tell your story!

 

True Story: As a kid I used to look through the appendices of the Atari BASIC manual and puzzle over all the error codes because I was curious as to what they all meant. This actually led me to getting interested in computers and eventually get a job as a systems analyst (or whatever my title is these days).

 

Looking back on it, I was a weird child.

[DavidMil]

Error 143 = "You keep feeding me tapes from that 3-pack of cassettes you bought for $1 down at the K-mart, then I'm not going to pretrend to try to retrieve your data"

 

KMart??? Man you were cheap. I always took the high road and went to Radio Shack. Still got the same result. The last straw was late one night,

the wife was calling my name "invitingly" from the bedroom, and I told her just one more minute and I kept getting 143 errors till I gave up and went

to bed. When I moved over next to the wife she said. "Go sleep with your computer!" Sigh... I lost out all around that night. Next payday I bought a

810.

 

David

[zzip]

 

KMart??? Man you were cheap. I always took the high road and went to Radio Shack. Still got the same result. The last straw was late one night,

the wife was calling my name "invitingly" from the bedroom, and I told her just one more minute and I kept getting 143 errors till I gave up and went

to bed. When I moved over next to the wife she said. "Go sleep with your computer!" Sigh... I lost out all around that night. Next payday I bought a

810.

 

David

 

Well I was a kid who couldn't drive, and Kmart was within walking distance of me. And I swear they weren't as crap as they are now!

 

Sounds like your wife gave you an "Error 138 - Device does not respond / device timeout"

[Kyle22]

That kind of sounds like a 144 to me.

 

"Error-144 Device done error.

 

This error occurs when you have issued a valid command to the peripheral but the device is unable to carry it out. For example, you may have tried to write to a disk that is write-protected, or there may be no disk at all in the drive. 'Your Atari Computer' implies that this error might also occur if the disk directory was damaged in some way.

 

The cause of the error depends on the device, so check the command given and whether the device is prevented in some way from executing it."

[Starman]

My grandfather bought me my first Atari 800 in 1984. Cassette and disk drive, but my mom wouldn't allow me to open the disk drive. So, i was stuck with the cassette drive which was a pain in the ass. After a week of getting frustrated, my grandfather said "I bought it, you can open the disk drive". So I did. However, the SIO cable was missing and nobody was home, so I walked five miles to the mall in the July heat to exchange it.

[zzip]

My grandfather bought me my first Atari 800 in 1984. Cassette and disk drive, but my mom wouldn't allow me to open the disk drive. So, i was stuck with the cassette drive which was a pain in the ass. After a week of getting frustrated, my grandfather said "I bought it, you can open the disk drive". So I did. However, the SIO cable was missing and nobody was home, so I walked five miles to the mall in the July heat to exchange it.

 

So why did your Mom let you use the computer but not the disk drive?

[TangentAudio]

... so I walked five miles to the mall in the July heat to exchange it.

 

Worth it.

[Starman]

 

So why did your Mom let you use the computer but not the disk drive?

 

 

Money. She thought the whole setup was too much. She didn't care about "slow and unreliable". She wanted me to take the drive back.

[+poobah]

Ahh yes, my old friend serial-bus data frame checksum error, and his buddy, Error 138, Device timeout.... How I loathed you both.

 

Somewhat amusing anecdote.... I actually had an occasion to indicate a malformed serial transmission with some development hardware, can you guess what I wrote to the log?

[Awch]

This is spooky timing. I was just thinking about that error this morning! Weird. It is one of my first specific memories of my Atari 400 and 410 (the original one with the metal handle that I'm still hunting to replace). I was up very late with a friend entering a game from a magazine. It took hours of us taking turns typing. We were exhausted! We finally saved the game and tried to load it and got the error number. We looked it up in the manual and read, "Serial bus data frame checksum error". We were so exhausted and dumbfounded by the seemingly indecipherable error message that we ended up laughing uncontrollably. Hours of work we're lost and we couldn't stop laughing.