Blue Screen of Death

Blue Screen of Death (also known as a blue screen or BSoD) is an error screen displayed on a Windows computer system after a fatal system error, also known as a system crash: when the operating system reaches a condition where it can no longer operate safely.

History

BSoDs have been present in Windows NT 3.1 (the first version of the Windows NT family, released in 1993) and all Windows operating systems released afterwards. (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. Because of the instability and lack of memory protection in Windows 9x, BSoDs were much more common.

Incorrect attribution

On 4 September 2014, several online journals, including Business Insider,DailyTech,Engadget,Gizmodo,Lifehacker,Neowin,Softpedia,TechSpot,The Register, and The Verge attributed the creation of the Blue Screen of Death to Microsoft's former CEO Steve Ballmer while citing a source that never said such a thing: An article by Raymond Chen (Microsoft employee) titled "Who wrote the text for the Ctrl+Alt+Del dialog in Windows 3.1?" The article was about the creation of the first rudimentary task manager in Windows 3.x, which shared visual similarities with a BSoD. In a follow up on 9 September 2014, Raymond Chen complained about this widespread mistake, claimed responsibility for revising the BSoD in Windows 95 and panned BGR.com for having "entirely fabricated a scenario and posited it as real". Engadget later updated its article to correct the mistake.