The news that Microsoft will soon retire the infamous “Blue Screen of Death,” aka BSOD, in favor of an all-black “simplified UI for unexpected restarts” has inspired a wave of nostalgia for the screen every Windows user has learned to hate. Take a look back at the history of the BSOD in this edition of Tech Time Warp.
The BSOD has been a Windows feature since Windows 3.0, which was initially released May 22, 1990, and brought some of the user-friendly features of the Apple Macintosh—including the use of clickable graphical icons instead of a long file list—to the PC arena. Windows 3.0 was compatible with MS-DOS programs and capable of running multiple programs simultaneously. Microsoft expected to sell a million copies of Windows 3.0 in the operating system’s first year; instead, it sold 4 million.
A farewell to the screen we loved to hate
The 1993 release of Windows NT 3.1 introduced the BSOD. Whenever your operating system encountered a critical error, the BSOD would appear, and you had no choice but to restart (and lose your work). John Vert, the programmer who wrote the original code for the BSOD, explained on Quora that the choice of white text on blue was simply a matter of matching other contemporary firmware and the SlickEdit text editor. In 2012, Microsoft added a frowning emoticon to the screen as a humanizing element, and later BSODs offered a QR code leading the user to support information on their mobile device. (But let’s be real—it all starts with a restart.)
As we say goodbye to the BSOD, let us remember one of its most infamous appearances, the 1998 Comdex demo of Windows 98 plug-and-play technology, where Bill Gates and Chris Capossela encountered the error message on stage. Watch it on YouTube.
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