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From: Drinian <sailracer6@yahoo.com>
Newsgroups: japan.anime.evangelion
Subject: Re: Error 601
Date: Tue, 05 Oct 2004 18:48:08 -0400
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Josef 'Jupp' Schugt wrote:
> Some days ago I bought 'The Andromeda Strain' (a 33 year old movie)
> on DVD. Brief sketch of the beginning of the story: A space probe
> crashes in the middle of a remote New Mexico village. All but two
> people in the village die - seemingly due to an infection. To find
> out how to fight against the postulated 'Andromeda' strain the
> subterranean high-tech 'Wildfire' laboratory is used that (no
> surprise, we are in the middle of cold war) has been built for B
> weapon research. During the analysis of the reproduction of the
> Andromeda strain the computer faces an input overload and displays '601'.
> 
> I tried to find out if there is a computer system that actually
> displays this error message. In our irreal universe such system
> seemingly does not exist but in the real universe of NGE it does (to
> be more precise: it will exist) - in the fifth Evangelion episode
> "Rei I", the same error code is displayed on a computer console
> operated by Dr. Ritsuko Akagi.
> 

Interestingly, I had read a while back that "Error Code 601" in Evangelion
is a reference to the BBC series "The Prisoner" in a Slashdot comment:

http://slashdot.org/articles/02/04/11/1948231.shtml?tid=168

I have watched the entire Prisoner series (which is *excellent* if you
haven't seen it) and am not sure where this reference is; perhaps the
author of the Slashdot comment simply extrapolated from Patrick McGoohan's
character, Number 6, who is constantly looking to find out who Number 1 is.

"The Prisoner" definitely did influence Eva, though. I won't say more
without spoiling the series for those who haven't seen it.

-- 
Drinian