Is it really better to print “Unhandled exception” or “Internal server error”?
Sometimes there just isn’t more context available to an error. This was even more the case 30 years ago, when errors were often nothing more than a numeric code — and then you look it up and it’s just some “unspecified data error.”
Just because the computer doesn't know why it crashed doesn't mean a human won't. At least print out a stack trace, or something, then print the haiku. Give someone a chance at figuring out what went wrong. Maybe there was a developer mode I wasn't aware of, but at least Windows at the time (3.1 and 95) was capable of giving the user some indication about what part of the software crashed, whether or not the user knew what to do with it. My first impression of the OS is what led me to avoid it, it's that simple. I don't know why other people didn't adopt it, I can't speak for them.
I think that probably is the case that the moment the computer throws an error, potentially having lost some work-in-progress data or any other "funny" consequence like that, is the moment the user is less likely to be receptive to jokes.
Sometimes there just isn’t more context available to an error. This was even more the case 30 years ago, when errors were often nothing more than a numeric code — and then you look it up and it’s just some “unspecified data error.”
BeOS tried to make light of that quandary.