How the Blue Screen of Death became your PC’s grim reaper

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How the Blue Screen of ****** became your PC’s grim reaper

There’s nothing more startling than your PC suddenly locking up and crashing to a Blue Screen of ******. Otherwise known as a Blue Screen, BSOD, or

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, a bug check screen, the Blue Screen of ****** is as iconic as it is infamous. Blue Screen of ****** is not a proper noun, but I’m going to treat it like one. It’s what you were met with during crashes on Intel’s 14th-gen CPUs, and it littered airport terminals during the recent CrowdStrike outage.

Everyone knows that a Blue Screen is bad news — tack on “of ******” to that, and the point is only clearer. It’s a sign that something catastrophic has happened, so much so that the operating system can’t recover, and it needs to reboot your PC in order to save it. The Blue Screen of ****** we know today, fit with its frowning emoticon, is a relatively new development in the history of Windows.

But a blue screen — this is why we had the proper noun distinction — dates back to the first version of Windows, and it has seen a lot of changes since then.

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Feeling blue

What causes a Blue Screen of ******? Where do they come from in the first place? More importantly, why are they blue? I’ll start with that last bit because it’s actually a straightforward answer. Dave Plummer, a former operating system engineer at

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, explained the origins in a detailed video on

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a few years back. Plummer attributes the creation of the modern Blue Screen of ****** with John Vert, showing up for the first time in Windows NT 3.1 in 1993.

You might speculate that blue was meant to calm users after a stressful ******, or maybe to align with

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’s blue ****** palate that it’s adopted. Nope. Things weren’t that deep back then.

According to Plummer, Vert used a white text on a blue background because it was comfortable. The developer used SlickEdit for programming and a MIPS OS box, both of which used white text on a blue background. These crashes forced the display adapter into text mode, which only had a basic ****** palette, and Vert chose blue because he was familiar with it.

This is what the original Blue Screen of ****** looked like in Windows NT 3.1.

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Plummer also reveals some interesting nuggets of information throughout the video, including why the majority of BSODs happen in the first place. The retired engineer says the vast majority of them come from driver errors. There are a lot of causes for a BSOD, but the reason why they happen is that Windows is trying to protect your system. If there’s an error, such as a driver writing to a place in memory that would cause ***********, the BSOD steps in to prevent that *********** and crashes the system.

The OS kernel is what interfaces between the hardware of your system and the OS proper, and kernel bugs can cause a BSOD. However, Plummer says that modern versions of Windows almost never encounter kernel bugs.

In most cases, it’s a driver, operating at the same level of access as the kernel, where the ****** comes from. There are other reasons why you’ll see a BSOD, including issues with your hardware and overheating, but drivers are the main culprit.

The origins of the blue screen

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The first version of Windows had a ****** screen, but it wasn’t the Blue Screen. From the first beta release of Windows 1.0, the OS would boot with a blue screen showing an early

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logo and some text in white. This continued throughout Windows 2.0 and 2.1, and in all of these versions of Windows, you could see a ****** on this screen. It would look something like what you see above, where an incorrect DOS version would cause the system to print a random string of characters.

This didn’t happen if the PC crashed, however. It would just lock up. Going into Windows 3.0, you would see error messages on a blue screen, but these didn’t cause the computer to reboot. It was more of a notice screen, something akin to what you see with a User Account Control (UAC) pop-up in modern Windows. Windows kept running despite the error. Instead, if there was a hard ******, you would see a ****** screen saying: “Could not continue running Windows because of paging error.”

The “blue screen of lameness” error as seen in Windows 95 Raymond Chen /

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The origins of the Blue Screen of ****** are sometimes incorrectly attributed to former

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CEO Steve Ballmer or

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programmer (and author of The Old New Thing blog at

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) Raymond Chen, but that’s not the case. It’s still John Vert. Chen, thankfully,

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concerning the Blue Screen of ****** earlier this year.

Ballmer wrote the text for a blue screen that was the original destination of Ctrl + Alt + Delete in Windows 3.1; Vert wrote the code for a ****** screen now known as the Blue Screen of ****** in Windows NT 3.1; and Chen was the last person to touch the code in Windows 95 that would display blue screen errors, but would otherwise let you proceed to use Windows if you chose.

The dynamic between the Blue Screen of ****** in Windows NT 3.1 and the “blue screen of lameness,” as

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, in Windows 95 is where things get messy. In Windows 95 and Windows 98, you’ll see Chen’s blue screen when a device driver crashes. This wouldn’t ****** Windows completely, however. Windows would stay running, and you could continue on, or you could press Ctrl + Alt + Delete to reboot your PC. There’s obvious crosstalk here, but Chen has made the distinction several times now that the Blue Screen of ****** came from Vert, while he last touched the blue screen of lameness in Windows 95.

It’s really tough to say who coined the term Blue Screen of ****** originally, but it probably stems from those ****** screen errors in Windows 3.1 and older. You can see in a

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the first use of ****** Screen of ****** documented by

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Books, while the

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was in the 1995 book PC Roadkill. Regardless of where the term originated, it was well within the vernacular by the time of the dot-com bubble and the turn of the century.

Shifting to cerulean

This is the basic Blue Screen of ****** that you’d see in Windows XP up to Windows 7.

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We’ve spent 1,000 words just getting through the first Blue Screen of ******, and that’s because, past Windows 2000, things get a little boring. With Windows 2000,

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did away with the NT branding for servers and workstations. So, instead of two different blue screens, we just got one. The blue screen that showed up in Windows 95 and 98 was retired, and the Blue Screen of ****** we know today was finally universal.

From Windows 2000 up to Windows 7, the Blue Screen of ****** didn’t change much. The text and formatting was tweaked between Windows 2000 and Windows XP, but

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stuck with the same basic design for many years. However,

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made a big change with Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8. The Blue Screen of ****** went from blue to cerulean — at least, that’s how Plummer describes it — and the string of error information was replaced with a sad emoticon and the text: “Your PC ran into a problem that it couldn’t handle, and now it needs to restart.”

This is the basic Blue Screen of ****** we’ve had since Windows 8, with

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adding a QR code to the screen in Windows 10. Jacob ****** / Digital Trends

This is the BSOD we all know and despise today, but it’s actually seen some significant changes over the past few years.

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,

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added a QR code to the Blue Screen of ******, which redirected to a support page. In Windows 11,

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originally changed the BSOD to a ****** screen, but it quickly reverted back to the familiar cerulean just a few months after release. In addition, you can see a green screen of ****** if you’re running an Insider preview build of Windows 10 or Windows 11.

The Blue Screen of ****** has a long history, and certainly a messy one, but it’s one of the most significant images in all of computing. If you want to celebrate it, and even play around with different colors, you can

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from

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, which will actually allow you to force a Blue Screen of ******. It’s a tool for debugging, not a toy, but I won’t tell you what to do with your software.

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#Blue #Screen #****** #PCs #grim #reaper

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