Microsoft retires iconic 'Blue Screen of Death' after three decades

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Sopan Deb

 

For millennials, blue can be a significant colour. It is associated with clues left by a well-meaning dog in our youth. Songs about a little guy that lives in a blue world (Da Ba Dee Da Ba Di). Or the rage-inducing abject failure of the Windows computer in front of us. In other words, the Blue Screen of Death.

 

And now, the world is set to bid a fond farewell to a generation’s most feared and notable error message, as Microsoft announced on Thursday that the screen was being officially replaced by a less friendly but more efficient Black Screen of Death. The simplified screen, Microsoft said in a blog post, would roll out later this summer, and “improves readability and aligns better with Windows 11 design principles, while preserving the technical information on the screen for when it is needed.” A new message — in white lettering — is slated to say, “Your device ran into a problem and needs to restart.” 

For more than three decades, Windows has denoted some sort of serious crash or slow down in its system with a blue screen. An early version of the message was written by the former chief executive, Steve Ballmer, according to Raymond Chen, a longtime Microsoft programmer. The message, released in the early S, would fill the screen: “This Windows application has stopped responding to the system.” Underneath, multiple soothing options were provided over the blue-screen background, including ESC, and ENTER — which would give you false hope that the problem was fixable — and then the last resort “Ctrl+Alt+Del” to give up and start over. 

An engineer named John Vert designed one for Windows NT soon after, and Chen helped finalise a new one for Windows 95 in 1995. All of them were blue by coincidence, according to a blog post by Chen. The change to a black screen comes in the wake of last year’s outage generated by the cybersecurity company CrowdStrike. Its software update unintentionally crippled computers using Windows software all around the world, causing disruption. 

“I like the Blue Screen of Death. To me, it means a lot. It’s calming because it’s blue and it’s got this kind of comical side to it,” Jake Moore, a cybersecurity adviser for the European-based company ESET, said. But after the CrowdStrike incident, Moore said that the blue screen may have overstayed its welcome. “When it triggered millions of blue screens of death around the world, I think the way it has  become so synonymised with the outage, I could see that may have created a time for change,”  Moore said. 

The change of the blue screen to black is causing an unusual type of nostalgia — longing for a reminder of bad times.

The black screen, Microsoft says, is a signifier of better days ahead. It will be “easier than ever to navigate unexpected restarts and recover faster,” the company said in its blog post. 

Customers may get a better experience, but that doesn’t mean everyone is ready to say goodbye.“I’ve learned so much from playing around with hardware, making mistakes, understanding what caused the ‘Blue Screen Of Death,’” Moore said. “It made me want to progress. It’ll be a shame to see it go. To some people it might not mean much. They might not even realise or notice any change. But to me, it’s an end of an era.”