Microsoft whiz dishes the dirt on the Blue Screen Of Death's colorful past

Veteran Microsoft engineer Raymond Chen has taken to his Old New Thing blog to clear up an apparent mystery regarding the origins of the infamous Windows Blue Screen of Death (BSOD).

But there is no mystery. Steve Ballmer wrote the text for the Windows 3.1x BSOD, although Chen whimsically called it a "blue screen of unhappiness" since it was more a warning that an application was poorly than anything else. A proper Windows 3.1x crash would actually result in a black screen of death - aka a command prompt - if you were lucky.

Windows 95 had a kernel error screen, the final version of which was written by Chen. This could be called a blue screen of death, although Chen noted: "Windows 95 lets you ignore the error, so it's not a true death." The engineer also conceded that ignoring the error was not guaranteed to leave the system in a usable state.

Finally, there is the Windows NT kernel error screen, which John Vert authored. If that bad boy pops up, NT is pretty much unrecoverable. However, the screen does contain a good deal of data to help engineers work out what made Windows so unhappy in the first place.

Subsequent versions of Windows NT have continued to evolve the data shown on the infamous screen right up to the present day.

Retired Microsoft engineer Dave Plummer said that he'd never heard the term "blue screen of death" in the corridors of Microsoft. Instead, it was known as a "blue screen" or, more frequently, a "bug-check."

Plummer also revealed why Vert went with white text on a blue background: "Put simply, because John's dev machine was a MIPS RISC box, and the firmware on that machine was white on blue.

"And in fact, his favorite editor at the time was SlickEdit, and the default text colors for SlickEdit were also white on blue.

"You could boot, code, and crash all in the same color scheme: white on blue."

Up until the CrowdStrike incident, the BSOD was an increasingly rare occurrence, appearing when running pre-production software, iffy drivers, or using problematic hardware. CrowdStrike changed all that, making the current crop of Windows bug-check screens something with which users became all too familiar.

But as to origins of the BSOD, the information is readily available. So long as your own PC has not fallen victim to a BSOD itself. ®