Veteran Microsoft engineer Raymond Chen has taken to his Old New Thing blog to clear up an apparent mystery regarding the origin of the infamous Windows Blue Screen of Death (BSOD).
Blue Screens of Death Explained
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 misfortune" because it was more of a warning that an application was bad 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 admitted that ignoring the error was not guaranteed to leave the system in a usable state.
Finally, there is the Windows NT kernel error screen, as John Vert wrote. If that bad boy shows up, NT is pretty much unrecoverable. But the screen contains a lot of data to help engineers figure out what made Windows so miserable in the first place.
