4 things you probably didn't know about the Windows “blue screen of death”

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On Friday, Microsoft was affected by a global outage, which was caused by an update from CrowdStrike, a company specializing in cybersecurity. According to the Redmond firm's explanations, this outage affected nearly 8.5 million Windows devices, or less than 1% of all computers that use the operating system. But in any case, this outage caused significant disruptions in many sectors, whether in the audiovisual, in air transport, or in businesses.

And whether on social networks or in the media, we have seen photos of screens displaying the famous “blue screen of death” or the Windows blue screen of death, which appears when there is a critical error on the system. Indeed, although we have somewhat forgotten it, this Microsoft error message still exists. And since Friday, the blue screen has been making headlines. In this article, we present some facts about the blue screen of death, which has become “a cultural icon,” according to Mar Hicks, a technology historian and associate professor at the University of Virginia’s School of Data Science, as quoted by CNBC.

Two Misunderstandings

In 2014, the creation of the blue screen of death was attributed to the wrong person. On September 2, 2014, Raymond Chen, a Microsoft employee, recounted how Steve Ballmer, the former CEO of Microsoft, wrote the message that Microsoft displayed when the user pressed Ctrl+Alt+Del on Windows 3.1. The information was misinterpreted by many sites, who thought that the author of the blue screen of death message was Steve Ballmer.

But in In reality, they are two different things. In an article published a few days later, Raymond Chen wrote a new post explaining that it was he himself who wrote the blue screen of death message on Windows 95. However, there was still an error, since the first Windows blue screen of death was not that of Windows 95, but that of Windows NT.

Who is the author of the first blue screen of death death ?

The author of the first blue screen of death on Windows was John Vert (which was confirmed by Raymond Chen in another publication on the Microsoft website). “In 1991, I wrote the original code for Windows NT 3.1 that put the video screen back into text mode and the routines to put text on it (and it was a piece of code truly terrible!)”, writes John Vert in a publication on the Quora site.

Why the blue ?

In his post on Quora, John Vert also explains why the text was displayed on its blue background . He says that the workstation he worked on had software that displayed the startup options in white on a blue background. And so it made sense that the error message corresponded to this graphical language.

But in addition to that, John Vert and his colleagues used a text editor called SlickEdit which also displayed the text in white on a blue background, by default.

Microsoft almost replaced the blue with black

< p>In any case, recently, Microsoft almost put an end to the blue screen of death, in favor of a black screen, on Windows 11. In July 2021, The Verge mentioned a Windows 11 update which replaced the blue screen by a black screen, while displaying the same message. But later, in November, another update restored the blue screen.

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