The error message sounds bad, but it was actually a good thing. A better phrased error message might have been “Keyboard missing. Connect a keyboard and press F1 to continue.” But, in the early days every byte mattered.
The system wouldn’t work without a keyboard, and if you get further into the boot process you might not be able to shut down cleanly if you didn’t have a keyboard attached. That error message gave you a chance to attach the keyboard, or to troubleshoot why the keyboard wasn’t being properly detected (like the plug got bumped and wasn’t making good contact anymore).
It was annoying when the lack of a keyboard was intentional. Like, you wanted to use the machine as a server. But, AFAIK you could disable this check if you knew the machine was going to be a server with no permanent keyboard attached.
You know that thing that you don’t have? You should press buttons on it.
Fuck you computer…
The error message sounds bad, but it was actually a good thing. A better phrased error message might have been “Keyboard missing. Connect a keyboard and press F1 to continue.” But, in the early days every byte mattered.
The system wouldn’t work without a keyboard, and if you get further into the boot process you might not be able to shut down cleanly if you didn’t have a keyboard attached. That error message gave you a chance to attach the keyboard, or to troubleshoot why the keyboard wasn’t being properly detected (like the plug got bumped and wasn’t making good contact anymore).
It was annoying when the lack of a keyboard was intentional. Like, you wanted to use the machine as a server. But, AFAIK you could disable this check if you knew the machine was going to be a server with no permanent keyboard attached.