There is nothing more surprising than having your computer suddenly crash and land on the Blue Screen of Death. Also known as Blue Screen of Death, BSOD or Within the walls of MicrosoftThe Blue Screen of Death, an error-checking screen, is as iconic as it is infamous. Blue Screen of Death is not a proper name, but I will treat it as if it were one. This is what you met during Crashes on Intel’s 14th generation CPUsand polluted airport terminals recent CrowdStrike outage.

Everyone knows that a Blue Screen is bad news; If you add “Death” to this, the issue becomes even clearer. This is a sign that a major disaster has occurred that the operating system cannot recover from and will need to restart your computer to save it. The Blue Screen of Death we know today is a relatively new development in Windows history, befitting its frowning expression.

But blue screen – hence the special noun distinction – dates back to the first version of Windows and has seen many changes since then.

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I feel blue

Plummer also reveals some interesting information throughout the video, including why the majority of BSODs occur. The retired engineer says that most of these are caused by driver errors. There are many reasons for a BSOD, but the reason they happen is because Windows is trying to protect your system. If there is an error such as the driver writing to a location that causes corruption in memory, BSOD will step in to prevent this corruption and crash the system.

The operating system kernel is the interface between your system’s hardware and the operating system, and kernel errors can cause BSOD. But Plummer says modern versions of Windows almost never encounter kernel errors.

In most cases, this is a driver running at the same access level as the kernel from which the crash came. There are other reasons why you might be seeing BSOD, including issues with your hardware and overheating, but the main culprit is the drivers.

Origins of the blue screen

The first version of Windows had a crash screen, but it was not a Blue Screen. Starting with the first beta version of Windows 1.0, the operating system would boot with a blue screen showing the old Microsoft logo and some white text. This continued in Windows 2.0 and 2.1 and in all these versions of Windows, you could see a crash on this screen. Something like what you see above will happen, where an incorrect DOS version will cause the system to print a random string of characters.

But this did not happen if the PC crashed. It would just lock up. When you enter Windows 3.0, you see error messages on the blue screen, but they did not cause the computer to restart. It was more of a notification screen, something similar to what you see in the User Account Control (UAC) popup in modern Windows. Despite the error, Windows continued to work. Instead, if it was a hard crash, you’d see a black screen saying: “Windows could not be started due to paging error.”

The origins of the Blue Screen of Death are sometimes incorrectly attributed to former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer or Microsoft programmer (and author of The Old New Thing blog at Microsoft) Raymond Chen, but this is not the case. Still John Vert. Chen, thank God. I solved this decades-long game of telephone It’s related to the Blue Screen of Death earlier this year.

Ballmer wrote the text for the original target: the blue screen. Ctrl + Alt + Delete In Windows 3.1; Vert wrote the code for a crash screen in Windows NT 3.1, now known as the Blue Screen of Death; and Chen was the last person to touch the code that displayed blue screen errors in Windows 95, but would otherwise allow you to continue using Windows if you chose.

The dynamic between the Blue Screen of Death and the “blue screen of lameness” in Windows NT 3.1 Chen calls himThings get complicated in Windows 95. In Windows 95 and Windows 98, you will see Chen’s blue screen when a device driver crashes. However, this will not cause Windows to crash completely. Windows will continue to run and you can continue or press the key. Ctrl + Alt + Delete To restart your PC. There’s an obvious confusion here, but Chen has made the distinction several times, with the Blue Screen of Death coming from Vert and most recently touching on the blue screen of lameness in Windows 95.

It’s really hard to say who first coined the term Blue Screen of Death, but it probably stems from black screen errors in Windows 3.1 and older. One 1993 issue of Computerworld First use of Black Screen of Death documented by Google Books First use of the Blue Screen of Death It was in the 1995 book PC Roadkill. Regardless of where the term originated, it was quite common in the vernacular around the turn of the century as the dot-com bubble emerged.

Switch to sky blue

We spent 1000 words trying to get past the first Blue Screen of Death, and that’s because things got a little boring after Windows 2000. With Windows 2000, Microsoft eliminated the NT brand for servers and workstations. So instead of two different blue screens we got just one. The blue screen of death that appeared in Windows 95 and 98 has been discontinued, and the Blue Screen of Death as we know it today has finally become universal.

From Windows 2000 to Windows 7, the Blue Screen of Death hasn’t changed much. Text and formatting changed between Windows 2000 and Windows XP, but Microsoft stuck to the same basic design for many years. However, Microsoft made a big change with Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8. The Blue Screen of Death changed from blue to azure—at least that’s how Plummer describes it—and the string of error information was replaced by a sad emoticon and text. : “Your computer encountered a problem that it could not resolve and now needs to restart.”

This is the BSOD we all know and despise today, but the last few years have actually seen some significant changes. As of Windows 10 build 14316Microsoft added a QR code to the Blue Screen of Death that redirects to a support page. In Windows 11, Microsoft turned BSOD into a black screen on startup, but it quickly resolved returned to the familiar sky blue just a few months after his release. You may also see a green screen of death if you are running. Insider preview build Windows 10 or Windows 11.

The Blue Screen of Death has a long and certainly complicated history, but it’s one of the most important images in the entire computing world. If you want to celebrate it and even play with different colors Download the NotMyFault tool From Microsoft, this will actually allow you to force the Blue Screen of Death. This is a debugging tool, not a toy, but I won’t tell you what to do with your software.