Death Becomes It: Who put the Blue in the Blue Screen of Death?
- Reference: 1612267626
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2021/02/02/windows_blue_screen/
- Source link:
Retired Microsoft engineer Dave Plummer took to [2]his YouTube channel over the weekend to give us his view on matters.
[3]
Firstly, "I never once heard the term 'blue screen of death' at Microsoft," he recalled, "We called it primarily just a blue-screen or, more frequently, a bug-check."
We'll stick with BSOD, thanks Dave.
[4]
Plummer then highlighted the infamous [5]onstage BSOD back in 1998 at the Comdex trade show in Vegas, when an impossibly youthful Chris Capossela, now MS's executive vice president of Consumer Business, was showing off Windows 98 to Bill Gates. Attaching a USB scanner resulted in a visit from Dr Blue.
The former engineer also mentioned a later incident involving a demo of the driving game Forza. Everything held up in rehearsals until the actual demo, where Windows did its thing once again. That one was down to the programmer's arch-nemesis: the memory leak.
The blue screen we all know and love today usually occurs when something has happened to cause the Windows kernel to call the [6]KeBugCheck function and bring down the system in what Microsoft brands a "controlled" fashion. The function should only be called when an unrecoverable error has occurred that threatens to corrupt the system itself.
"Calling that API," remarked Plummer, "is a little like pulling the fire alarm in a theatre."
A BSOD might mean work in progress was lost, he added but "it's better than corrupting already saved work in the form of data loss."
It was not always thus. In the early days it was sometimes possible to carry on in the hope of saving that almost-finished opus before the operating system threw in the towel once and for all.
"With NT," said Plummer, "it's not so simple. It's supposed to be robust and secure and trustworthy, meaning 'borked' was not really in our vocabulary."
While today's BSODs are generally the result of something like an iffy driver, and tweaks to the user mode driver model have improved things, screens of blue have been a fixture of Windows since v1.0.
The early blue screens merely threw up garbage that was generally unreadable. It was an indicator that a Bad Thing had happened, yet it wasn't until the advent of Windows 3.1 in April 1992 that things got a little more informative and helpful with what Plummer called "the control-alt-delete" screen.
It was not quite a BSOD (indeed, Windows 3.1x could crash back to MS-DOS when the wheels properly came off) and being triggered by hitting ctrl+alt+delete when a program stopped responding, the screen (or dialog) was both blue and an indicator that all was not well.
Raymond Chen [7]laid claim to the blue control-alt-delete screen (or dialog) of Windows 3.1 itself, however it was Steve Ballmer [8]that infamously came up with the text to give the user the opportunity to try and kill the non-responsive app.
Windows NT was considerably better at dealing with errant processes, but why blue for its bugcheck? A tribute to the precedent set by Windows of old? Perhaps just a quick way of knowing which machine in the test lab had fallen over?
Plummer tracked down the developer behind Windows NT's blue screen (who he identified as John Vert having trawled through the code.) The blue? Nothing to do with labs, or earlier incarnations of Windows. As Plummer pointed out, "Windows was not the original UI for NT, the OS/2 Presentation Manager would have been."
The choice came down to the lowest common denominator for the video hardware on which NT ran. There were only a limited number of colour text mode available, with white on a dark colour seeming a good choice.
And the blue? "Put simply, because John's dev machine was a MIPS RISC box, and the firmware on that machine was white on blue.
"And in fact, his favourite editor at the time was SlickEdit, and the default text colours for SlickEdit were also white on blue.
"You could boot, code, and crash all in the same colour scheme: white on blue."
Blue screens have continued into Windows 10, even if things have been updated slightly and the shade of blue is not quite what it was. Other colours have crept into the mix, including the green versions faced by Windows Insiders. It is also possible to alarm onlookers with a [9]custom tint .
[10]
We've seen our fair share of BSODs and attempted to revive Windows 3.1 with Chen's ctl+alt+delete dialog on many occasions in our time, and we also have a certain fondness for the red text of an Amiga Guru Meditation error. That, however, is a story for another day. ®
Get our [11]Tech Resources
[1] https://www.theregister.com/Tag/bork
[2] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCNzszbnvQeFzObW0ghk0Ckw
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2YBmFK@HynRwRSpECKmqFEwAAAAE&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33YBmFK@HynRwRSpECKmqFEwAAAAE&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[5] https://www.theregister.com/2018/04/20/windows_98_comdex_bsod_video/
[6] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/ddi/ntddk/nf-ntddk-kebugcheck
[7] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20140909-00/?p=44123
[8] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20140902-00/?p=93
[9] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/notmyfault
[10] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44YBmFK@HynRwRSpECKmqFEwAAAAE&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[11] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: CTRL-ALT-DELETE x2
Windows 98 borked so much it needed a reinstall every few months, Windows 98 SE was better.
Oh and let's not forget the infamous bug that made Windows 98 never finish the shut down to the point that until Windows 98 SE came out some people just went to Dos mode before shutting down the computer.
Only too true. I resintalled that bastard over 300 times - I know, I counted.
When XP came along, what a relief ! Finally a system that could last a week without borking itself !
Ah, the memories....
... or all the crash screens:
Guru Meditation (Amiga)
one or more bomb icons (Atari ST, IIRC)
a sad computer icon/ a dead computer icon (Classic MacOS (pre- X))
Purple screen of death (esxi)
ABEND (Netware and others)
At least that's all I remember seeing.
Re: Ah, the memories....
From the Mac II onwards the Sad Macs had different chimes depending on the ROM/machine. Also you forgot the System/MacOS bomb boxes: "Sorry, a system error has occured" - and the restart button didn't always work lol
Re: Ah, the memories....
On the Atari ST, the number of bombs indicated how serious the error was*. Sometimes you'd just get one or two, a whole screen of bombs, better turn it off for a while and read a book.
* Actually, no - there's a specific meaning for each number of bombs (eg 5 bombs = division by zero), it's just how it seemed to me as a user...
I remember the early fail messages well, along with the rather daft options of "Abort", "Retry" or "Fail".
When computer literate people often fail to understand the difference between "Abort" and "Fail", it's no wonder it was confusing to general users!
I have to use an online booking system for some equipment at work. Once I have made a booking I can cancel it. Clicking on the "Cancel" button brings up two choices: "Continue", which cancels, and "Cancel", which continues.
My personal favourite for confusing all and sundry has always been the classic "an unexpected error has occurred". Which of course implies that there are all sorts of expected errors just waiting to happen.
Although I do remember the old MDIS operating system which had an error message "PUNT!" Which I always took to mean "It's crashed, quick blame somebody else".
However the peak of user confusion was a system which had the error message "Would you like a lightly grilled stoat in a bun with fries?" inserted for when somebody selected a menu option that hadn't yet been coded. Somehow this snuck through the net before the system was passed for UAT. A few days into testing, one of the end users who had never used a computer in his life called the helpdesk and told them his computer had just asked him if he wanted a stoat. The poor sap on the helpdesk spent ages with the end user before he finally accepted that the message which had flashed up on the green screen terminal was genuinely asking the user if they required a small mammal of the genus Mustela and species Erminea.
"an unexpected error has occurred"
Actually logical if used correctly.
It just means execution has fallen through the error handling for all possible errors the benighted programmer was able to think of at the time or the testers were able to generate to annoy said programmer.
Admittedly it's not too helpful but followed by a clean(ish) shut down is preferable to a crash.
Programmer's arch-nemesis!
From the article: "That one was down to the programmer's arch-nemesis: the memory leak."
Fixed that for you!
"That one was down to the hacker's arch-nemesis: the memory leak."
I've not caused a memory leak this century (probably longer) and I program in C, many assemblers and occasionally Python and C++.
But, then I am exam, experience and certification body qualified. And I undertake regular CPD (continuous professional development) training. You know like other professionals do: Doctors, Pharmacists, Lawyers, Accountants, etc.
Icon - I hope it's flameproof! I can feel the heat from the hackers before I even submit!
Re: Programmer's arch-nemesis!
it's all fun and games till you find out the cpu and hardware actually leak ...
Vert? Really?
The original programmer was called John Vert, and he went for blue instead of green? Talk about a missed chance for immortality...
Re: Vert? Really?
"l'écran Vert de la mort"
With a name like John Vert
...it really should've been green.
Can't remember where or when I first heard it called the Blue Screen Of Death, but the action of windows displaying the screen has always just been Blue Screening.
As in the well worn phrase "windows just fucking blue screened again, the bastard"
WordPerfect for DOS
Also the preferred colour scheme for WordPerfect 5.1 & 6 for DOS (the only versions I've used).
Re: WordPerfect for DOS
and norton commander, and all the Borland 'Turbo' languages ide's and so many other programs.. even windows 2.0 was all white and blue.( ok white background and blue text / buttons this time )
MS support
I was on a lengthy (10.5 hours) conference call with Microsoft support for a Windows NT 4 server and told the tech what he had just asked us to do with the server resulted in a 'blue screen of death' to which he, quite huffily, replied: 'We don't call it that!'. My response to him: 'Fine; you know what I'm talking about.'
BSOD
Back in the XP days I crafted a jpg replica of an actual BSOD I had received and used it as a screen saver and desktop background.
Helpdeskers tended to do double takes when stopping by my machine.
Good times.
Re: BSOD
Before they were assimilated into Microsoft the SysInternals website used to have a BSOD screensaver.
"It is also possible to alarm onlookers with a custom tint."
That's been possible for a long time; when I was on win95 or 98 (can't remember which) I was seeing it enough to want to customise it, and ended up with a rather tasteful lilac (at least on that particular monitor) instead.
I think this was how it worked, too long ago to remember: http://smallvoid.com/article/bsod-change-color.html
~Windows 2000, I stumbled onto a registry (?) change where you could change the colors of the BSOD, which of course I switched to white or red and promptly forgot about. Some time later the inevitable happened; what new devilry is this?
Blue screen?
In the early days of DOS, when TSR programs were a big thing (terminate-and-stay-resident), there was briefly available a blue-screen-of-death recolourizer. I have to say I never used it but a informal local poll of our computer users voted it the most useless software utility ever, edging out the TSR which detected cat-like typing. Over the years I have continued to agree with the winner of the poll but, now having owned cats, I am more sympathetic to the cat-like-typing detector.
CTRL-ALT-DELETE x2
Loved watching the chillens in the lab, using Win98, telling another kid to hit CTRL-ALT-DELETE x2 They all got a kick out of it...