Steve Ballmer Wrote The Infamous Error Message "Blue Screen Of Death"
The Blue Screen of Death (also known as a stop error, bluescreen, Blue Screen of Doom, BSoD, bug check screen or Stop screen ) is an error screen displayed after a fatal system error.
BSoDs have been present in all Windows-based operating systems since Windows 3.1. (See History of Microsoft Windows.) BSoDs can be caused by poorly written device drivers or malfunctioning hardware, such as faulty memory, power supply issues, overheating of components, or hardware running beyond its specification limits. In the Windows 9x era, incompatible DLLs or bugs in the operating system kernel could also cause BSoDs.
Blue screen saved your computer from permanent damage. Often times when there was corruption in a file it gave you a chance to recover your drives before losing all of your persistent data as well as what was in open unsaved files.
According to a blog post from Microsoft developer Raymond Chen (via The Verge), the text from that famous blue screen was written by none other than Steve Ballmer, the bombastic ex-CEO of Microsoft.
Chen says Ballmer was head of Microsoft’s system division when he paid a visit to the Windows team. And when he saw Control-Alt-Delete and the original text for the Blue Screen of Death, he said, "This is nice, but I don’t like the text of the message. It doesn’t sound right to me.”
According to Chen, someone from the Windows team challenged Ballmer to write a better message if he thought he could do a better job — and he did. Chen says Ballmer’s text “went into the product pretty much word for word.”
Here is that text, courtesy of Chen:
It has changed significantly to provide the stop code and a message of the type of error.
BSoDs have been present in all Windows-based operating systems since Windows 3.1. (See History of Microsoft Windows.) BSoDs can be caused by poorly written device drivers or malfunctioning hardware, such as faulty memory, power supply issues, overheating of components, or hardware running beyond its specification limits. In the Windows 9x era, incompatible DLLs or bugs in the operating system kernel could also cause BSoDs.
Blue screen saved your computer from permanent damage. Often times when there was corruption in a file it gave you a chance to recover your drives before losing all of your persistent data as well as what was in open unsaved files.
According to a blog post from Microsoft developer Raymond Chen (via The Verge), the text from that famous blue screen was written by none other than Steve Ballmer, the bombastic ex-CEO of Microsoft.
Chen says Ballmer was head of Microsoft’s system division when he paid a visit to the Windows team. And when he saw Control-Alt-Delete and the original text for the Blue Screen of Death, he said, "This is nice, but I don’t like the text of the message. It doesn’t sound right to me.”
According to Chen, someone from the Windows team challenged Ballmer to write a better message if he thought he could do a better job — and he did. Chen says Ballmer’s text “went into the product pretty much word for word.”
Here is that text, courtesy of Chen:
It has changed significantly to provide the stop code and a message of the type of error.
Windows 9X BSOD
Windows XP BSOD :
Windows 8 BSOD with sad emoticon
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