upvote
30 or so years back, one of the Mac magazines had a customer support quote along these lines:

"I don't understand, it says 'System Error Type 11', and no matter how many times I type 11, nothing happens!"

reply
Now imagine if that error said 'Error 11: A memory error occurred. Your program may be faulty or misbehaving. Contact your software vendor." That's miles better than what most things provide.

That one's a good example of why these things are hard. The user could have been running 5 different programs, any one of which caused this error, and MacOS can't point the finger at anyone. Not to mention that the problem could be MacOS itself, or the user being a dunce who misconfigured something. I'm not sure if that error can occur without 3rd party software being involved, but if it can, then that error message might need to be even more vague, helping the user even less. Not to mention it could just be faulty hardware.

A paper manual offering troubleshooting steps for each error would be really helpful. Just 'Error 11. Consult your manual.' and the manual actually telling you what the problem could be is also miles better than what we usually get.

reply
This was 30 years ago, it was Mac OS classic with co-operative multitasking and zero inter-process memory protection, when the error comes up the only option was "restart" (the computer, not the task).
reply
I know.
reply
The author Terry Pratchett had some of best error messages in his Discworld novels. The Hex computer could produce the following

++?????++ Out of Cheese Error. Redo From Start.

+++ Divide By Cucumber Error. Please Reinstall Universe And Reboot +++

+++Whoops! Here comes the cheese! +++

reply