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Comment by hypercube33 | Hacker News Reader

Fascinating. Dave over at Dave's Garage on YouTube talks about having a dec I believe -- if what you heard is true I wonder if it was the sole machine you're talking about. Maybe he can shed some light from the other side (Microsoft)

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IIRC - he mentioned that someone _else_ had a DEC machine, and actually used it as their dev box. The dev with the DEC box person developed the kernel panic code, aka the blue screen of death - and blue was chosen because that's the default screen colour when the DEC box is turned on. The idea was to reset the colour to the default before printing the kernel panic message.

So while DEC NT is sort of a footnote, it did have this pretty profound influence : )

Windows 3.x's fatal exception screens were also blue.

Indeed; I think Windows 2.0 even had it. The story might sound plausible until the holes are poked in the hypothesis.

So were the color schemes on many 8-bit computers of the '80s, such as Ataris and Commodores.

This is a bit of a game of telephone - NT Alpha shipped after NT 3.1 (i386 & Mips) and the port was done almost entirely by DEC. The blue screen preceded the Alpha and was really based on the color scheme from the firmware on the Mips workstation which Microsoft built internally. And, of course, the legendary SlickEdit, which was one of the original editors available on Win32.

After NT 3.1, Microsoft assumed primary responsibility for NT Alpha, although there were also some great people at DECWest still involved.

source: me, I'm the 'someone _else_' who owned all the Alpha stuff at Microsoft.

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