wierd C error message

[utzoo!decvax!harpo!eagle!mhtsa!alice!rabbit!wolit]

I just tried quoting a character literal with a grave accent on a
4.2bsd system, and got the same result (except that the first word was
"gcos", not "gecos").  My guess is that this is a very old vestigial
error message, referring to the GCOS operating system on the Honeywell
6000 computer at Bell Labs, Murray Hill.  ("GCOS", by the way is
derived from "GECOS", the first two letters referring to General
Electric, who manufactured this line of machines before Honeywell
bought them out.)  GCOS dealt with characters in BCD, not ASCII,
format.
	Jan Wolitzky, BTL MH