The Disney Lion King Disaster (2013)
alexstjohn.com
alexstjohn.com
What is he on about? Encarta was the Wikipedia of its time.
Now, the hard drive itself was about 130 megs. Not huge, but not terribly tiny either for a computer bought the day the LA Riots started. However, the action to speed up the song created a new file which filled up that hard drive, and once at the end of the disk, Windows did the most logical thing it could do. It started writing from the beginning of the disk, paying no heed to what was already on it. Over the partition table, over system files, over c:\windows, everything. I'll spare you the details of the righteous fury we were subjected to after, but suffice to say, it was non-fun.
It's not like you hitting ctrl-alt-del made the computer unstable, you were just poking the cooperative multitasking system (by generating a magic, meaningful system interrupt) into realizing it was already unstable.
If you got to the point of seeing that blue screen it was really really unlikely you'd never recover system stability without a restart, thus it was still a blue screen of death. Of course, you were free to try if you wanted to. But most likely whatever crashed or froze up that process spewed a bunch of crap all over areas of memory it had no knowledge of and fucked a bunch of other things up.
The win32s didn't need that because they were pre-emptively multitasked almost all the way down and could detect their own failures better.
If this piques your interest, I would recommend diving in. He's got great stories.
> The Windows 3.1 version relied on the WinG graphics API, but a series of Compaq Presarios were not tested with WinG, which caused the game to crash while loading.
> The crashes caused game developers to be suspicious of Windows as a viable platform and instead many stuck with MS-DOS. To prevent further hardware/software compatibility issues, Direct X was created.