On the second half of July 2024, one of the biggest Windows outages hit enterprises and businesses worldwide as a consequence of a botched CrowdStrike Falcon update. The cybersecurity firm admitted in its Preliminary Post Incident Review (PIR) that its buggy IPC Template Type was what essentially led to the outage, and later Microsoft too provided a thorough explanation.
Since BSOD is currently a hot topic these days with various articles going around the internet, Raymond Chen, a veteran Microsoft Windows developer, this week, penned a new blog post titled "There is no mystery over who wrote the Blue Screen of Death, despite what some may want you to believe" in his 'The Old New Thing' column on Microsoft's DevBlogs site, shedding light on the apparent shroud of mystery about the origin of the Windows' Blue Screen of Death (BSOD).
Chen writes:
Somehow, there is a claim of a 30-year mystery surrounding Microsoft’s Blue Screen of Death. The argument goes that there are three conflicting sources of authorship: Steve Ballmer, John Vert, and me.
But really, there is no conflict. There are three different blue-colored screens, and each has a different author.
Interestingly, it looks like the initial blue screen of death was not about death at all, but as Chen puts it humorously, a "blue screen of unhappiness." This was invoked when one pressed the CTRL + ATL + DEL keys together (called the "three finger salute"), which helps pause a Windows session when a user is not quite happy with how their PC behaves.
Chen notes that the text portion, not the underlying code, of the above BSOU message was written by Steve Ballmer for Windows 3.1.
As for the BSOD, you may be surprised to know that the black BSOD that the tech giant temporarily tested on Windows 11 was originally there in Windows 3.1 as well, though it did not really say much. So those who are not satisfied with the amount of information given on the current BSOD screen may have hated Microsoft even more back then.
Up next, a year later in 1993, we had the Windows NT 3.1 BSOD which was the first true blue screen of death kernel error and was implemented by John Vert. Windows NT 3.1 was also the first true 32-bit Windows OS which is how it differed from Windows 3.1 and thus the name NT or New Technology.
Windows 95 also had its BSOD and was different from the one in NT 3.1 as it allowed the user to ignore and skip the error message. Raymond Chen was the one who designed this one.
If you recall, this was also the famous, or rather the infamous Windows 98 BSOD that happened during a keynote address at the annual COMDEX trade show in 1998.
Source: Microsoft
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