How the Blue Screen of Death became your PC’s grim reaper

November 11

There’s nothing more startling than your PC suddenly locking up and crashing to a Blue Screen of Death. Otherwise known as a Blue Screen, BSOD, or within the walls of Microsoft, a bug check screen, the Blue Screen of Death is as iconic as it is infamous. Blue Screen of Death is not a proper noun, but I’m going to treat it like one. It’s what you were met with during crashes on Intel’s 14th-gen CPUs, and it littered airport terminals during the recent CrowdStrike outage.

Everyone knows that a Blue Screen is bad news — tack on “of Death” to that, and the point is only clearer. It’s a sign that something catastrophic has happened, so much so that the operating system can’t recover, and it needs to reboot your PC in order to save it. The Blue Screen of Death we know today, fit with its frowning emoticon, is a relatively new development in the history of Windows.

But a blue screen — this is why we had the proper noun distinction — dates back to the first version of Windows, and it has seen a lot of changes since then.

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Feeling blue

What causes a Blue Screen of Death? Where do they come from in the first place? More importantly, why are they blue? I’ll start with that last bit because it’s actually a straightforward answer. Dave Plummer, a former operating system engineer at Microsoft, explained the origins in a detailed video on YouTube a few years back. Plummer attributes the creation of the modern Blue Screen of Death with John Vert, showing up for the first time in Windows NT 3.1 in 1993.

You might speculate that blue was meant to calm users after a stressful crash, or maybe to align with Microsoft’s blue color palate that it’s adopted. Nope. Things weren’t that deep back then.

According to Plummer, Vert used a white text on a blue background because it was comfortable. The developer used SlickEdit for programming and a MIPS OS box, both of which used white text on a blue background. These crashes forced the display adapter into text mode, which only had a basic color palette, and Vert chose blue because he was familiar with it.

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This is what the original Blue Screen of Death looked like in Windows NT 3.1. WikiMedia Commons

Plummer also reveals some interesting nuggets of information throughout the video, including why the majority of BSODs happen in the first place. The retired engineer says the vast majority of them come from driver errors. There are a lot of causes for a BSOD, but the reason why they happen is that Windows is trying to protect your system. If there’s an error, such as a driver writing to a place in memory that would cause corruption, the BSOD steps in to prevent that corruption and crashes the system.

The OS kernel is what interfaces between the hardware of your system and the OS proper, and kernel bugs can cause a BSOD. However, Plummer says that modern versions of Windows almost never encounter kernel bugs.

In most cases, it’s a driver, operating at the same level of access as the kernel, where the crash comes from. There are other reasons why you’ll see a BSOD, including issues with your hardware and overheating, but drivers are the main culprit.

The origins of the blue screen

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The first version of Windows had a crash screen, but it wasn’t the Blue Screen. From the first beta release of Windows 1.0, the OS would boot with a blue screen showing an early Microsoft logo and some text in white. This continued throughout Windows 2.0 and 2.1, and in all of these versions of Windows, you could see a crash on this screen. It would look something like what you see above, where an incorrect DOS version would cause the system to print a random string of characters.

This didn’t happen if the PC crashed, however. It would just lock up. Going into Windows 3.0, you would see error messages on a blue screen, but these didn’t cause the computer to reboot. It was more of a notice screen, something akin to what you see with a User Account Control (UAC) pop-up in modern Windows. Windows kept running despite the error. Instead, if there was a hard crash, you would see a black screen saying: “Could not continue running Windows because of paging error.”

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The “blue screen of lameness” error as seen in Windows 95 Raymond Chen / Microsoft

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 that’s not the case. It’s still John Vert. Chen, thankfully, cleared up this decades-long game of telephone concerning the Blue Screen of Death earlier this year.

Ballmer wrote the text for a blue screen that was the original destination of Ctrl + Alt + Delete in Windows 3.1; Vert wrote the code for a crash screen now known as the Blue Screen of Death in Windows NT 3.1; and Chen was the last person to touch the code in Windows 95 that would display blue screen errors, but would otherwise let you proceed to use Windows if you chose.

The dynamic between the Blue Screen of Death in Windows NT 3.1 and the “blue screen of lameness,” as Chen calls it, in Windows 95 is where things get messy. In Windows 95 and Windows 98, you’ll see Chen’s blue screen when a device driver crashes. This wouldn’t crash Windows completely, however. Windows would stay running, and you could continue on, or you could press Ctrl + Alt + Delete to reboot your PC. There’s obvious crosstalk here, but Chen has made the distinction several times now that the Blue Screen of Death came from Vert, while he last touched the blue screen of lameness in Windows 95.

It’s really tough to say who coined the term Blue Screen of Death originally, but it probably stems from those black screen errors in Windows 3.1 and older. You can see in a 1993 issue of Computerworld the first use of Black Screen of Death documented by Google Books, while the first use of Blue Screen of Death was in the 1995 book PC Roadkill. Regardless of where the term originated, it was well within the vernacular by the time of the dot-com bubble and the turn of the century.

Shifting to cerulean

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This is the basic Blue Screen of Death that you’d see in Windows XP up to Windows 7. WikiMedia Commons

We’ve spent 1,000 words just getting through the first Blue Screen of Death, and that’s because, past Windows 2000, things get a little boring. With Windows 2000, Microsoft did away with the NT branding for servers and workstations. So, instead of two different blue screens, we just got one. The blue screen that showed up in Windows 95 and 98 was retired, and the Blue Screen of Death we know today was finally universal.

From Windows 2000 up to Windows 7, the Blue Screen of Death didn’t change much. The text and formatting was tweaked between Windows 2000 and Windows XP, but Microsoft stuck with 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 went from blue to cerulean — at least, that’s how Plummer describes it — and the string of error information was replaced with a sad emoticon and the text: “Your PC ran into a problem that it couldn’t handle, and now it needs to restart.”

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This is the basic Blue Screen of Death we’ve had since Windows 8, with Microsoft adding a QR code to the screen in Windows 10. Jacob Roach / Digital Trends

This is the BSOD we all know and despise today, but it’s actually seen some significant changes over the past few years. Starting in Windows 10 build 14316, Microsoft added a QR code to the Blue Screen of Death, which redirected to a support page. In Windows 11, Microsoft originally changed the BSOD to a black screen, but it quickly reverted back to the familiar cerulean just a few months after release. In addition, you can see a green screen of death if you’re running an Insider preview build of Windows 10 or Windows 11.

The Blue Screen of Death has a long history, and certainly a messy one, but it’s one of the most significant images in all of computing. If you want to celebrate it, and even play around with different colors, you can download the NotMyFault tool from Microsoft, which will actually allow you to force a Blue Screen of Death. It’s a tool for debugging, not a toy, but I won’t tell you what to do with your software.